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“You need to get some sleep.”
Renji realized he had been bouncing his leg, hard enough that the bunk shook and squeaked underneath him. It came out a stammered, uneven, ugly metal rhythm. It was the kind of unconscious thing that Renji was constantly catching himself doing, like spacing out or clenching his fists too hard. Like his body’s own little reminders to him. Hey! You’re a person! Keep an eye on this shit.
He flattened his leg instantly, then when that felt uncomfortable he tried throwing it over the edge of the bunk, dangling between bed and floor. Out of the bare corner of his vision, Renji could see Izuru’s silhouette. The idea of his fluffy blond hair poking up in weird directions with half his face smushed into the pillow, all soft sleepy cheeks and tired eyes. In a way they were the perfect match as roommates. Izuru, at least, wasn’t a stranger to sleepless nights.
Renji felt bad for waking him up, but wouldn’t say so. He resented that he had to, so he adjusted his arms beneath the pillow and scowled at the ceiling. “Just bored.” No position he’s in felt comfortable. It felt like, one way or another, his body won’t lie flat. The bunk was too soft. The blanket was too heavy. This room was too safe, and yet strange and unfamiliar.
Izuru blinked at him. Heavy lids fluttered over cloudy blue eyes, his delicate brows trying to furrow and divine some clarity in the middle of his tired daze. “Are you okay, Abarai-kun?” Renji doesn’t have to look to see, just heard the bunk across the room from his own shift and squeak as Izuru settled, threatening to sit up. “You’re not still thinking about that thing, are you?”
“No.” Renji lied, badly, with his voice laced in annoyance. “I already told you, I’m just bored! Probably just didn’t get enough training done today, waiting on my ass for you and Hinamori to finish at the library. Go to sleep already!”
Izuru will know that’s not true. Will know Renji is still dwelling on that assignment, the one he got a poor grade on, and is trying to figure out where this failure fits into his life now. Grades aren’t everything, Renji will proudly declare while watching with baited breath for his teachers to betray his score.
He tried to count down the number of failing marks he can get before Shin’o kicks him out, but the idea of the number causes his chest to tighten and his head to swim. Renji tried to fathom a number he may very well be rapidly approaching and found that he can’t feel his hands. He figures out the number and then forgot it almost immediately, like his immune system rejecting a foreign body.
“You’re trying really hard.” Izuru’s works broke the cycle of Renji’s thoughts. His voice is full of sincerity, like he actually meant what he was says, and it boiled Renji from the inside out. How is he supposed to know how hard Renji is trying? Izuru does well in all of his classes. People like Izuru more than he realized. Why does Izuru worry about so much when he clearly has no need for it? He should leave it to losers and fuck-ups like Renji, who need all the help they can get.
“Great! Thanks for that, Kira.” Renji rolled over, and he kicks the wall hard with the bottom of his foot. It stings a lot, he has to keep from cursing. “I can’t wait to join the ‘Tried Really Hard’ division!”
It’s quiet for a moment. Sounded like Izuru has slunk back under his blankets. Sounded like Renji has hurt his feelings. He held back a sigh and pinched his brows. The kid was always so emotional late at night. Renji guessed he doesn’t like to feel alone. That’s very instinctual.
Bare feet touched the cold floor, it felt rough under Renji’s toes because neither he nor Izuru bothered to clean up much. The dust and dirt was as natural under Renji as anything else here. “I’m sorry.” No response. Maybe Izuru fell back asleep and won’t remember this? More likely that his courage has just been stomped and now he’s too smart to try Renji’s stupid goddamn temper.
You and me both, buddy. “I’m gonna take a shower.”
He pulled his yukata closer around his body, Renji’s hands fumbling along the walls for the way to the bathroom, when he hears Izuru mumble behind him, “Feel better.”
Renji found this situation to be breathtakingly, painfully typical.
Renji’s sleeping yukata, like his school uniform, was a loan from the school. It’s frayed at the edges, discolored from use and re-usage. It must have been light blue at some point, but had faded to a muddy gray. It always smelled funny, not especially bad but just wrong. Like it was very clear that this was someone else’s yukata.
You might say that it suited Renji perfectly, then. Renji put his hands in the outside pocket and pulled out a wad of gum that he doesn’t remember placing there. Gross.
When they were freshmen, Renji and Izuru only had access to the communal bathrooms. They both hated it, Izuru more so than Renji. Izuru’s body was different, was soft in some places where other boys were flat and flat in other places where other boys were less so. Renji understood soon after they became roommates and catching the occasional glimpse of Izuru’s shallow breast pressing against his loose and baggy clothes. He felt the same protective urge he felt for Rukia practically all their lives.
For Renji, being around boys was a confusing time. Age, years, and physical growth meant so little to Soul Society as a whole but to the individual it mattered quite a lot. And as much as Renji and anyone else could tell you that they didn’t care about their birthday or their age or their origins, a lifetime was a long-ass time to go without ever thinking about those things. There was only so much that could be done not to notice the way Renji towered over the rest of his class, that his broad shoulders and intense features opened up a crowd like a wedge knife, but underneath the robes and the bluster he was surprisingly skinny. Years of starvation don’t just melt off the body. Years of scars do exactly what you would expect.
Who the fuck cared? If people chose to ignore Renji, let them ignore. If people chose to stare, let them stare. Let them look at his fucked up hands with the knuckles unaligned, and his bruises from fights behind the courtyard, and the tattoos over his brows in rebellious bolts, and his dark, distant fucking beady eyes. Renji’s fingers gently pulled apart skin around his eyeball, his narrow pupil staring back at itself. Fuck, dude. Those looked like eyes you’d see in wild pigs or something.
He didn’t care about that. His eyes. What was he, a girl primping in the mirror? Did he care when people said he looked scary or threw around the word ‘dog’ with an intended weight? No. Get your head out of your ass, Renji. You had something to do.
The medicine cabinet was opened. Izuru got the two lower shelves, while Renji occupied the higher. Izuru and Renji’s toothbrushes. Some bottles of medicine for when they got headaches or became sick. They were made by the Fourth Division to keep students healthy, though Renji heard some people got high off them. He wondered how much you’d have to take to feel an effect, or if that was just a shitty rumor and you’d send yourself into the Fourth even faster. Renji’s razor.
Renji hated that thing not most of all, but close to it. He hated it more than he hated his peers and his hand-me-down-yukata and Izuru’s misplaced pity. He almost hated it as much as he hated the stubble that threatens to bloom from his cheeks and chin every morning or so, the rapid accumulation of thick hair under clothes. He hated that he can feel his body change day by day by day.
Men had given nothing to Renji, except bruises and bad memories. Men were the reason Rukia still fell into spells of nausea when a man looked at her a certain way. And now, though Renji had no real idea of his age and only a vague inclination of identity, he had the growing fear that he might be slumping inch by agonizing inch into manhood. He wished he could reject it like a virus, or like the numbers he was supposed to remember.
Renji took out the razor, turned it over in his hands. How often did the blade need to be replaced? How did one know? No one had ever told Renji this, and like hell was he going to ask. He placed his thumb on the corner of the blade and tried to jiggle it out of it’s place. To Renji’s definite lack of surprise, a bead of dark blood began to well up between flesh and cool metal.
Ah, yes. There was always another option. Renji didn’t have to watch his body grow into a stranger. Renji didn’t even have to worry about the consequences of failing his test. He didn’t have to worry about who hated him or tried to ignore him, what kind of world would be exactly the same without him in it. Nobody did, really.
Renji wonders if when Rukia walked away, she considered that she might be seeing him for the last time. Renji didn’t. Couldn’t make himself. If the last memory he had of his best friend, the young woman he loved like a sister, that he loved more than his own self, was the memory of her back towards him as she went to become someone else’s family was going to be the last memory he had of her, he might as well not even be here to retain just a terrible image inside of him.
He pressed on the blade harder, Goddamn, these were hard to dislodge. Maybe it wasn’t the kind that came apart? Could Renji do this with the rest of the razor still attached?
What would it be like when he was gone? Would his tormentors be remorseful, or more horrified? Obviously, some would think he was a coward. Renji would, too, but only because he’d know why.
He hoped they’d be shocked. He hoped people would be haunted, the picture of Renji’s arms split open like an act of defiance, purging all the things he had been holding in. Red spilled across white tiles. Nasty, like he is inside. This was what your beautiful, perfect Seireitei did. This is your shitty, fucked up reality waiting for you out there in the real world.
Nope, that blade sure wasn’t coming out of there. Maybe Renji could get his sword from the main room and do that?
He cringed. Most of what Shin’o taught was horseshit from start to finish, but to use the sacred thing that could have become Renji’s zanpakuto- if it were possible for a person like him to even create a zanpakuto out off all the pieces left of himself, Renji was already doing it a disservice by trying to off himself. No need to add insult to injury. Maybe Izuru had a letter opener or pocket knife or something responsible like that. Even scissors would do.
Izuru. Oh yeah.
Izuru would probably be the one to find Renji’s body. His blood slowed inside his body to a cold and glacial pace, frozen in his veins. That wasn’t fair. Maybe some people deserved to walk into their bathroom for a quick piss and see a bloody, dead body there, but Izuru obviously didn’t. That would be cruel.
Renji sourly dropped the razor in the sink. Of all people to be upset if Renji died, Izuru might be the person who would care the most. Hinamori would probably care. Hisagi, if word ever got to him in the Ninth Division. Rukia probably wouldn’t, now that she had more important things to worry about and better people to love her, they might not even tell her because he wasn’t important enough to be on a Kuchiki’s radar. But still. Three whole people. What a pain in the ass.
The knock on the door was gentle, but loud enough to startle Renji into jumping. He yelped in a way that was neither cool nor impressive. “What?”
Izuru’s voice, still tired but alive with concern. “Are you okay, Abarai? I don’t hear the water on. Do you need help with the faucet?”
Renji put a hand on his chest and steadied his breathing, about to ask that the hell with help for the damn faucet. And then he remembered that, oh yes, when they first started using the public showers, Renji didn’t know how to turn them on. Never run across such a thing before, in the big old scary world. Running water. Inside a building. How wacky was that?
“Nah. No.” Renji forced himself not to stutter, swallowing. The past few minutes felt like a dream he had. Fuck. What’s wrong with him, thinking about dying like that was a thing to do. Izuru was in the next room. Like, what was seriously wrong with him. “I got distracted.”
Izuru was quiet for a moment. Renji wondered if he had gone back to sleep.
“Please come back to bed.”
For reasons Renji couldn’t explain, he did want to.
Renji opened the bathroom door, flooding yellow light into the dark bedroom. Izuru looked sleepy and tired and golden, one eye squeezed shut, one eye squinting against the light. Renji’s shadow split Izuru in half like a ribbon.
“Yeah.” Renji agreed, surprising himself. He hardly agreed to anything. “Yeah, I’m goin’.”
And he did. He shuffled around Izuru and crawled back into his bunk, and across the room Izuru crawled back into his. Izuru wrapped himself up like a cocoon and Renji watched him fade into unconsciousness. What a weird kid. What a weird, sweet, weird kid.
And Renji went to bed. And he failed to sleep. The bed gently rocked and jolted under the constant motion of Renji’s leg bouncing up and down, faster than Renji could count or even breath.