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The loudest sound in the whole house is the one of the leaky bathroom sink. Water creeps from the lip of the faucet, gathering in a fat drop before falling and striking the bottom of the basin in a crash that is somehow both wet and sharp.
It continues until Renji twists the knob on the sink and the inauspicious dripping pours out in a waterfall to crash around the dome bottom and begin filling up the basin. He balances his soul communicator on his shoulder before setting it down on the sink’s linoleum surface and setting it to speaker.
“You’re not going to be late, right?” Rukia’s voice comes through the other side, sounding tinny through miles of static, but Renji can still hear her deep, dry doubt. “It’s really important that you be here. This is a big deal for Kotetsu-san, and Kiyone is nervous. I need you to make sure everyone is on board.”
“It’s just a party, Rukia. Believe me- this crowd’ll be into it. All you gotta do is make sure nobody drinks too much, and have Ayasegawa and Hisagi sit on opposite sides of the room.” Renji says, taking advantage of the fact that he’s unseen to roll his eyes at Rukia’s fretting. For how charming the woman could be, she really had no idea how to handle social events. Emphasized by the fact that she expected Renji to be the hype-man for the rest of the lieutenants.
Renji’s hands searched the towel rack, calloused fingers tracing over folds of soft terrycloth with the years of familiarity until finding a suitable washcloth. The fabric grows heavy and hot when it’s held under the faucet before Renji shuts the water off. Dripping wet and and gently bleeds beads of water down his wrist and forearms, Renji brings the washcloth to his face and runs it over his skin. It was way too hot, his face feeling flush against the dampness but it was also a relief. It feels warm and clean and pure.
Ignoring the water now dripping off his nose and chin, Renji wrings the towel out over the sink. “Trust me, it’ll be fine. Are you sure Kotetsu even wants a party, anyways? Like, it’s real cool of you to want to host and all, but she doesn’t seem like that type.”
“She’s not. I mean- I don’t think she is…” Renji hears Rukia sigh heavily on the phone. She sounds so mature when Renji is just listening to how low her voice has become, not like the high, shrill, raspy kind of growl she used to have when they were kids. He sees how people who don’t know her very well can find Rukia intimidating.
“I just think it’s important that we support her. Becoming an official captain is kind of a huge fucking deal, you know?” Rukia goes on.
“Yeah…” Renji agrees, but his mind instinctively flits back to Momo, Shuuhei, and Izuru and he cringes. Nobody was throwing parties for them when they were filling in for their captains’ positions. Of course, they weren’t official captains, but for almost a year they might have well been.
“And, y’know, it’s kind of a good omen, too.” Rukia continues, and it sounds like she can tell she’s starting to lose him in his thoughts. Renji pulls open the medicine cabinet and retrieves the things he needs; the bottle of shaving cream and the steel razor, from their usual position on the bottom shelf. “This is, like, the first time in a long time that a lieutenant got promoted to captain. Who knows when it’ll happen again?”
“It might happen sooner than you think.” Renji says wryly, pulling his loose hair back and away from his face and making sure the heavy mass of it rolls down his back behind his shoulders. He has absolutely no doubt that it must have escaped Rukia that she is up next to get promoted to captain of the thirteenth. “Everything’s changing pretty fast, huh?”
“I guess…”
There’s a solid minute of dead air between them. Renji focuses on depositing a truly overzealous amount of shaving cream into his palm and smoothing it down over his cheek and chin, as a clever cover for not reflecting too much on the very loaded sentence he just said.
“So you’ll be here, yeah?”
“Yes!” Renji groans, wiping his hands off on a towel and admiring his santa claus-esque face in the bathroom mirror from all angles. “For the millionth time! Go be a good hostess and make sure the estate has enough food for twelve vice-captains under one roof!”
He ends the call very purposefully and rudely. Sorry, Rukia, but Renji has a hot date with a sharp object close to his face, and he can only do so many things at once.
Now, without the buzzing of the phone, it’s quiet once again. Water continues to drip from the faucet, slow and steady, but this time the drops slap against the surface of clear water instead of carved porcelain.
Renji’s razor is a plain, dull steel, the kind with replaceable razors and feels heavy in his grip. Something solid for him to wrap his fist around, with rust touching the corners from many years of use. With two fingers behind the corner of his jaw, angling in front of the mirror, the razor blade drags down the long valley of Renji’s cheek. It cuts through the frothy white foam like wings through a cloud, leaving behind only a perfect expanse of dark, smooth skin.
Renji used to hate shaving, when he was a teenager. Everything about it. The way it took so much time out of his busy day. The seemingly complicated methodology behind the whole process. That it was another fucking thing Renji had to tack on to the list of things needed in order to seem presentable. That he had nobody to show him how to do it, and resulted in definitely a few stares and snickers when a surly Renji went to class with some torn up bits of toilet paper stuck to his face.
Still, shaving was far better than the alternative. He got picked on enough in the academy without adding a patchy, bright red peach fuzz on his face into the mix. He did eventually get a handle on the whole process, especially when he had to start shaving his eyebrows for his tattoos to show.
About halfway through clearing his face, watching the razor leave behind clean strokes of skin, Renji pauses. Eyebrows furrow, and without meaning to, the image of that kid scowling into the dorm room lavatory mirror invades his mind like a festering weed.
He was skinny as a kid, though it wasn’t always noticeable. Renji always had broad shoulders, filling up his uniform like the wires of a kite to give him width, but underneath he was all ropy muscle and sharp angles.
That same kid who acted so brazen as exiled to lurking in the corner of the locker rooms and public baths, being simultaneously grateful and angry that Izuru wasn’t with him and he had to just be there for people to notice the way ribs pressed against his skin. The way his arms and legs were too long and gaunt for his torso, his body growing faster than his skeleton could handle. One of the longer goodbyes the Rukongai gave him was a thinness and a hunger that didn’t fit together.
Looking back on it, Renji probably wasn’t the only one. Definitely wasn’t, actually, the only one there to have old scars and broken knuckles. It was just being in a sea of kids from the seireitei, the children of nobles who all learned the rules of fighting from special tutors, and the fact that Renji seemed to stick out from all of them like a big, red, loud, mean-looking thumb. He couldn’t just fail to notice his peers’ flawless skin and perfect bodies when his was already decrepit and raw in places all over.
Renji was not an attractive kid, no matter what way you looked at it. Rare to smile, rare to relax. He remembers seeing passing glances of his reflection and being shocked by what he saw- a garish flash of red hair and eyes like perfect needle pricks. Something that hardly even looked human. A beady-eyed, frothing little beast of a boy, and that was using the word ‘boy’ loosely.
‘Boy’ was still better than ‘man’. Because, historically, men are rarely better than boys. What was Renji supposed to think of? The thieves and deadbeats in Hanging Dog who made his life miserable? Or his teachers in Shin’o, who were all lazy and arrogant and didn’t give a shit about him. Rukia was lucky to be a girl and to be pretty. It made life even harder for her than it was for Renji, but at least she’d always be gentle and beautiful and not ugly and course.
The razor interrupts the quiet when it tinks against the surface of the sink, Renji trading the grip in exchange for a dry towel to run over his face and catch any strace traces of cream. Against his better judgement, he allows his eyes to roll over the shapes of his body as he does so.
He doesn’t resemble the gaunt skeleton-men of his childhood home, or the bloated, austere frowns of his teachers. Having built himself out of firm muscle and hard lines, Renji more resembles a fist- just this brutal and barren shape, heavy enough to take damage when he throws himself into the fray. His tattoos carve jagged shapes into him like extra rows of teeth, or permanent bruises, or streaks of perfectly black blood.
Renji throws the towel over his shoulder, letting it slap against his back while he runs his fingers through his hair and shakes out curtains of eye-popping red. He knows when it’s pulled back away from his face, the long hair looks wild and untamed. It makes the corners of his jaws look severe, the raised hackles of a creature to emphasize his sharp, wolfish features. But right now it just looks like hair. It’s soft and shiny. It catches the stray glow of the fluorescent light over the mirror, flashing from scarlet to gold.
Renji’s hair is longer than it was when he was a kid. Some people even call it ‘beautiful’, showering in him compliments he’s too awkward to do anything with except try not to blush. Does that mean he’s beautiful now? More than once, people have called him handsome (whether or not they said this to sleep with him is an outside factor) does that mean he outgrew the runty, gawky kid he used to be? If he used to be an unstable, bitter little ugly duckling who nobody wanted, does that mean Renji is now supposed to be the big, smokin’ hot swan that came from all that mess?
More importantly, why does he care? Why does he still care?
Water runs over the razor, cleaning off the blade before Renji slides his thumb over the dull part of the razor and slides it out of its slot. One moment, it’s an ordinary razor, for shaving and such important adult needs. The next, it’s a razor blade. It has no purpose except to cut.
Pinching the flat side between his finger and his thumb, Renji feels hot where his skin touches steel. Not because the metal itself is hot but because he feels very warm suddenly. He remembers once burning with some putrid rage. Being ready, at any minute, to explode.
It’s weird for him to think about the fact that he never expected to live this long. In Renji’s mind, he always had a goal; to grow strong. To become something bigger and meaner and badder than himself. To be a monster that ate something bigger each day until he was the biggest thing there was. But he didn’t think about a career, or family, or friends, or really even being a person. And if Renji couldn’t reach his Goal, then the rest of it wasn’t important enough on their own. It didn’t matter.
Of course, that was then. This is now. Renji has people who rely on him. He has a life to live, one that doesn’t revolve around making sure he gets hit the least amount of times during schoolyard fights behind the locker rooms. He doesn’t feel like he has a reason to not be living his life anymore.
He never talked to anyone about that. Not even to Izuru, who was fucking right there on that night. And something about that seems kind of unfair- he doesn’t get to sit down with people and be like ‘You should appreciate me, for what I didn’t do. I wanted to, and I could have, but I worked really hard not to want it and so I didn’t. I did that by myself. That means something.’
He thinks that means something.
Even now, Renji could still do it. He doesn’t want to kill himself, but he knows that he could if he did, which is the scariest part.
He wants to feel bad for his past self. With his poofy, baby ponytail and his hair trigger temper, and his three friends, and his occasional wanting to be dead. Renji wishes he could feel pity for that kid, who thought he hated the whole world when he really just desperately hated himself. Renji wishes he could be sympathetic, instead of being disgusted. In the end, that kid was just another asshole who left Renji more baggage to deal with today. He’s a series of past mistakes that lead to a more bitter and broken him.
And the worst part is now, Renji has to look in that mirror again. And he has to see himself, big, bad, tattooed Renji. Still beady-eyed. Still all scarred and roughed up. And he has to decide if it really made a difference, all that growing up.
Renji’s soul communicator screeches to life, vibrating so hard it bangs against the sink countertop and threatens to throw itself off the edge and onto the linoleum. Because Renji doesn’t want to deal with what most certainly will be a cracked screen repair fee, his body instinctively snaps to life before his brain does. The razor blade clinks against the inside of the trash can and Renji’s hand pins the phone against the granite. Izuru’s name pops up on the screen, Renji automatically hitting the talk button.
“Yeah, I’m goin’.”
“Relax. It’s still early.” Izuru chides. He sounds hoarse and breathless, and Renji feels a need to remind him not to be overworking himself again before he puts a pin in that urge. At least Izuru is still being active, staying on his feet until he fully recovers his health. “I just wanted to know what you wanted to do for lunch today.”
“Ramen.” Renji says automatically, then pauses for a bit. He fumbles with drawers on the bathroom cabinet, sliding and banging them open until he manages to find his brush and a loose hairtie. “... No, sushi.”
“Sushi-ramen?” Comes the dry response on Izuru’s end, and Renji can hear him smirking through the speaker.
“You’re joking, but that sounds fucking amazing.” Renji holds the hairtie between his teeth, running the brush through his hair until it schooles itself into a curtain of pure smoothness. “No, remember the sushi place near the Sixth? The one with the taiyaki cart near it?”
“The reason that the taiyaki cart is always by the Sixth,” Izuru explains with a thick air of patience. “Is because you always go to it.”
“Well, that’s weirdly specific focus-marketing, but I can’t say it doesn’t work.”
Izuru laughs through the speaker, sounding kind of raspy but very much alive. Renji grins to himself privately. He’s very charming.
“I’ll just meet you at your office at noon. No dessert until after lunch.”
“Okay, Mom.” Renji drawls, waiting for the notification that Izuru has hung up to pop on screen before dismissing the call himself.
At the very least, not everything he got out of those years was shitty.