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[fic] Bleach - Four RenRuki Flashfics
here, have some flashfics in celebration of Single Awareness Day Valentine's Day. 8D hurray for lame holidays that are a good excuse to write fluff. i wanted to do all eleven prompts, but i didn't have time, so...here. have four. :D
01. kisses
Renji has never been a soft or especially tactile man. His hands are rough and callused from years of training with a blade, his tongue sharp from growing up on the streets, and his face often drawn into a scowl for no particular reason. He has been known to accidentally break delicate things with his strong hands, and when he claps a friend on the back, he sometimes leaves unintentional bruises. Thankfully his friends know him well and his often harsh words and inadvertent impertinence rarely hurt feelings.
It's not that he's overly brutish, really--more that he's just so much bigger than most of his company that he forgot how easily he could damage them without really meaning to. He's given Kira more than his fair share of bruised shoulders, and he's always a little worried to spar with Hinamori after nearly breaking her tiny hands a few times with his practice sword back at the academy.
But with Rukia he is gentle, always. Not because he views her as fragile or particularly breakable (though he does acknowledge that she is very small), but because there is something about her tiny shoulders and dainty hands and those big ash-blue eyes of her that makes him want to be careful and mild. Oh, certainly, his mouth is no less foul when he speaks to her (they call each other idiots so very affectionately), nor his hands any less coarse when he touches her (in fact, she's been known to kick his ass on occasion when they spar, and this usually prompts him to cuff her fondly upside the head), but when no one else is around, he sloughs off the outermost layer of his decidedly thuggish veneer and the scowl fades a little. When he touches her face, his fingers are light on her skin, and he cradles her jaw like glass when he kisses her.
02. addicted to you
Sometimes she drops by his office unannounced because she knows he hates the quiet of a long workday. Sometimes she brings lunch, other times not. Sometimes she natters at him, sometimes just being in the same room is enough. Sometimes they bicker just for the sake of bickering, because neither one of them really knows what to do with silence. And sometimes it really makes all the difference between a good day and a bad one.
"You shouldn't eat so fast; you'll get a stomachache," she chides him today, wagging one slim finger at his head as he shoves another taiyaki into his mouth (head-first. Eating them from the tail up seems like a cruel and unusual slow death for the pastry, in his mind).
"You always say that," he complains in return, wiping a glob of the custardy filling from the corner of his mouth and giving her a sour look as he shuffles through the papers on his desk, "and yet it never happens."
She looks at him sidelong, one eye narrowed. "Well maybe you should cut back on the sweets anyway," she continues, mostly just being incorrigible now. "That's your fourth one in an hour."
"And?" he counters, popping the last piece of the confection into his mouth and sucking on one fingertip pointedly. "You sayin' I'm gonna get fat?"
She arches one eyebrow and rises to her feet, approaching the desk and resting her hands on the top of it, leaning forward to give him a very serious look.
"I'm saying I think perhaps you have a problem, Renji," she says, still feigning severity but trying very hard not to laugh. She reaches out and grabs one of the pastries from the box he bought from one of the street vendors off the main road that cut through the center of Seireitei. "Your enslavement to the taiyaki is reaching an unhealthy level."
He defiantly takes another pastry from the box and nibbles on the fish's head.
"Is this an intervention?" he demands, and there's something almost coy in his eyes then. Almost. Far be it from Abarai Renji to be flirtatious--the man barely knows how. "I can quit any time."
Her hands slap the desktop audibly, sending a few of his papers rustling. "Spoken like a true addict!" she accuses, a grin in her voice though valiantly absent from her features. She jabs her hand toward him, the taiyaki caught in her fingers as she shakes it at his nose. "I refuse to watch you continue to degenerate."
Renji snaps a hand up faster than she can recoil and grabs her wrist, and she squeaks in alarm as he squeezes his fingers around her hand. He tugs her forward impulsively and rises to his feet all in one motion, leaning over the desk and across her shoulder to confide in her ear, "Then it's a good thing the one thing I can't give up is you, now isn't it?"
And as quickly as he grabbed her, he has released her, dropping back into his chair to leave her leaning forward, unbalanced, over the desk, the taiyaki dangling from her fingers and a flush blooming pink across the bridge of her nose. He goes back to his paperwork as if nothing happened, and she moves silently back to the couch in the office, staring at the taiyaki in her hands a moment before shoving the fish's head in her mouth spitefully. He just grins without lifting his head, and she glowers.
"Idiot," she growls.
But maybe she won't scold him for this particular addiction.
03. candy
They say the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, and Abarai Renji is really no exception. It is no secret that Renji has a sweet tooth; anyone who has spent any time in the man's company can attest to this. He loves pastries, always has a bag of hard candies in his desk, and puts enough sugar in his coffee to put a man twice his size into a diabetic coma (it's actually sort of a wonder his teeth haven't rotted out of his head by now).
And so anyone who knows him knows that if they need a favor, it's best to preface the appeal with something sweet. (Granted, Renji is really just a big squishy pushover and couldn't say no to a friend anyway, but it's the thought that counts.) This also goes double for when Renji has inevitably gotten his nose all bent out of shape over something, as he is often wont to do.
Today he's having a bad day. Even a generally genial and easygoing fellow like Renji is not impervious to a bad day. He overslept this morning, and the woven strap on his left waraji broke on his way to the office, sending him stumbling rather spectacularly out of shunpo and right into the dusty road. He has received no less than four papercuts since he started on his duties for the day, and worse yet, someone has not only used the last of the tea (Byakuya will have their head, he has no doubt), but they've polished off the last of the sugar in the break room, and so his coffee is bitter and leaves him making wretched faces as he forces it down.
Renji spends his lunch break seething, viciously hacking at his bentou and actually splintering one of his chopsticks in the process, driving a wicked sliver of bamboo straight into his finger. With a yowl that is much more of exasperation than pain, Renji snaps to his feet and stalks out of the office, pausing long enough to snarl at Byakuya that he'll be out for the rest of his lunch hour.
When he returns, his mood is little improved. In fact, it might be worse. He tried to get the splinter out of his skin and only succeeded in making his entire finger throb terribly (the splinter remaining stubbornly embedded in his flesh), and the taiyaki vendor was closed for the weekend. Storming back into his office, Renji flops down into his chair and scowls balefully at the stack of paperwork on his desk (surely waiting to eagerly add to his papercut count).
His eyes slide to the left of the stack of papers then, and the ire is swept off his face with a wave of brief disorientation as he notes that there is a small box situated on the desk that was not there when he left. It's not wrapped but for a single white ribbon around the entire thing, tied in a precise, tight bow. With a frown, he reaches for it (gingerly, so as not to aggravate the splinter in his hand), tugs the bow undone, and lifts the lid off the box.
A crooked smile crawls over his face then as he sees the contents of the box: a haphazard pile of small (slightly burnt-looking), vaguely rabbit-shaped chocolates. There is no note, no signature, no explanation, but there really doesn't need to be. He's forgotten it's the fourteenth--he often does. (He never forgets next month's fourteenth, but he often loses track of February.)
Popping one of the candies in his mouth (they are burnt...but...they were last year, too), he just shakes his head, digs a band-aid out of his desk, and goes back to his paperwork. Maybe the rest of the day won't be so bad after all.
04. Blush
Neither of them is prone to fluster, really. They grew up with far too much opposition and resistance to really let much of anything get to them. But romance has always evaded them as well, even after all this time. Renji's always been a rather fetching fellow, with his broad shoulders and contagious laugh, his sly grin and his genial nature. He's had his share of admirers over the years. Likewise Rukia, with her classic beauty and her big, captivating eyes, her strong, slender hands and air of confidence, has always had a follower or two in her day. Her status as an unwed member of the Kuchiki family didn't hurt that either. And neither of them ever paid these distant affections much mind. Any dating on Renji's part was recreational and rarely lasted long, and any courting of Rukia's hand was brushed off, albeit politely, with a graceful wave of those delicate fingers of hers.
It is at the softer, more gossamer things in life that they fumble. Yes, as adept as the two are at combat, kidou, zanjutsu or otherwise, they are both mostly gauche with affection. Renji's words are clumsy and his hand is adhered to the back of his neck whenever the subject of sentimentality is brought to the table, and Rukia's touch is inelegant and her eyes averted when her fingers move to thread into his. Her fair, milky skin is almost white against the darker almost olivey tone of his hands, and as he glances down to look at the braid of their fingers together, his eyes widen a little, and then he glances away with a soft bluster.
Her pale face reddens, though she often initiates the contact, and she always keeps her face low and the fingers of her free hand over the bridge of her nose until someone speaks. And somehow once the silence is broken then it's okay, and her blush fades, and they can move on with their lives.
He never blushes, but his ears are known to turn pink at the edges, and he always makes sure to wear a particularly bright and gaudy bandanna whenever he makes plans to meet Rukia outside of work.
01. kisses
Renji has never been a soft or especially tactile man. His hands are rough and callused from years of training with a blade, his tongue sharp from growing up on the streets, and his face often drawn into a scowl for no particular reason. He has been known to accidentally break delicate things with his strong hands, and when he claps a friend on the back, he sometimes leaves unintentional bruises. Thankfully his friends know him well and his often harsh words and inadvertent impertinence rarely hurt feelings.
It's not that he's overly brutish, really--more that he's just so much bigger than most of his company that he forgot how easily he could damage them without really meaning to. He's given Kira more than his fair share of bruised shoulders, and he's always a little worried to spar with Hinamori after nearly breaking her tiny hands a few times with his practice sword back at the academy.
But with Rukia he is gentle, always. Not because he views her as fragile or particularly breakable (though he does acknowledge that she is very small), but because there is something about her tiny shoulders and dainty hands and those big ash-blue eyes of her that makes him want to be careful and mild. Oh, certainly, his mouth is no less foul when he speaks to her (they call each other idiots so very affectionately), nor his hands any less coarse when he touches her (in fact, she's been known to kick his ass on occasion when they spar, and this usually prompts him to cuff her fondly upside the head), but when no one else is around, he sloughs off the outermost layer of his decidedly thuggish veneer and the scowl fades a little. When he touches her face, his fingers are light on her skin, and he cradles her jaw like glass when he kisses her.
02. addicted to you
Sometimes she drops by his office unannounced because she knows he hates the quiet of a long workday. Sometimes she brings lunch, other times not. Sometimes she natters at him, sometimes just being in the same room is enough. Sometimes they bicker just for the sake of bickering, because neither one of them really knows what to do with silence. And sometimes it really makes all the difference between a good day and a bad one.
"You shouldn't eat so fast; you'll get a stomachache," she chides him today, wagging one slim finger at his head as he shoves another taiyaki into his mouth (head-first. Eating them from the tail up seems like a cruel and unusual slow death for the pastry, in his mind).
"You always say that," he complains in return, wiping a glob of the custardy filling from the corner of his mouth and giving her a sour look as he shuffles through the papers on his desk, "and yet it never happens."
She looks at him sidelong, one eye narrowed. "Well maybe you should cut back on the sweets anyway," she continues, mostly just being incorrigible now. "That's your fourth one in an hour."
"And?" he counters, popping the last piece of the confection into his mouth and sucking on one fingertip pointedly. "You sayin' I'm gonna get fat?"
She arches one eyebrow and rises to her feet, approaching the desk and resting her hands on the top of it, leaning forward to give him a very serious look.
"I'm saying I think perhaps you have a problem, Renji," she says, still feigning severity but trying very hard not to laugh. She reaches out and grabs one of the pastries from the box he bought from one of the street vendors off the main road that cut through the center of Seireitei. "Your enslavement to the taiyaki is reaching an unhealthy level."
He defiantly takes another pastry from the box and nibbles on the fish's head.
"Is this an intervention?" he demands, and there's something almost coy in his eyes then. Almost. Far be it from Abarai Renji to be flirtatious--the man barely knows how. "I can quit any time."
Her hands slap the desktop audibly, sending a few of his papers rustling. "Spoken like a true addict!" she accuses, a grin in her voice though valiantly absent from her features. She jabs her hand toward him, the taiyaki caught in her fingers as she shakes it at his nose. "I refuse to watch you continue to degenerate."
Renji snaps a hand up faster than she can recoil and grabs her wrist, and she squeaks in alarm as he squeezes his fingers around her hand. He tugs her forward impulsively and rises to his feet all in one motion, leaning over the desk and across her shoulder to confide in her ear, "Then it's a good thing the one thing I can't give up is you, now isn't it?"
And as quickly as he grabbed her, he has released her, dropping back into his chair to leave her leaning forward, unbalanced, over the desk, the taiyaki dangling from her fingers and a flush blooming pink across the bridge of her nose. He goes back to his paperwork as if nothing happened, and she moves silently back to the couch in the office, staring at the taiyaki in her hands a moment before shoving the fish's head in her mouth spitefully. He just grins without lifting his head, and she glowers.
"Idiot," she growls.
But maybe she won't scold him for this particular addiction.
03. candy
They say the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, and Abarai Renji is really no exception. It is no secret that Renji has a sweet tooth; anyone who has spent any time in the man's company can attest to this. He loves pastries, always has a bag of hard candies in his desk, and puts enough sugar in his coffee to put a man twice his size into a diabetic coma (it's actually sort of a wonder his teeth haven't rotted out of his head by now).
And so anyone who knows him knows that if they need a favor, it's best to preface the appeal with something sweet. (Granted, Renji is really just a big squishy pushover and couldn't say no to a friend anyway, but it's the thought that counts.) This also goes double for when Renji has inevitably gotten his nose all bent out of shape over something, as he is often wont to do.
Today he's having a bad day. Even a generally genial and easygoing fellow like Renji is not impervious to a bad day. He overslept this morning, and the woven strap on his left waraji broke on his way to the office, sending him stumbling rather spectacularly out of shunpo and right into the dusty road. He has received no less than four papercuts since he started on his duties for the day, and worse yet, someone has not only used the last of the tea (Byakuya will have their head, he has no doubt), but they've polished off the last of the sugar in the break room, and so his coffee is bitter and leaves him making wretched faces as he forces it down.
Renji spends his lunch break seething, viciously hacking at his bentou and actually splintering one of his chopsticks in the process, driving a wicked sliver of bamboo straight into his finger. With a yowl that is much more of exasperation than pain, Renji snaps to his feet and stalks out of the office, pausing long enough to snarl at Byakuya that he'll be out for the rest of his lunch hour.
When he returns, his mood is little improved. In fact, it might be worse. He tried to get the splinter out of his skin and only succeeded in making his entire finger throb terribly (the splinter remaining stubbornly embedded in his flesh), and the taiyaki vendor was closed for the weekend. Storming back into his office, Renji flops down into his chair and scowls balefully at the stack of paperwork on his desk (surely waiting to eagerly add to his papercut count).
His eyes slide to the left of the stack of papers then, and the ire is swept off his face with a wave of brief disorientation as he notes that there is a small box situated on the desk that was not there when he left. It's not wrapped but for a single white ribbon around the entire thing, tied in a precise, tight bow. With a frown, he reaches for it (gingerly, so as not to aggravate the splinter in his hand), tugs the bow undone, and lifts the lid off the box.
A crooked smile crawls over his face then as he sees the contents of the box: a haphazard pile of small (slightly burnt-looking), vaguely rabbit-shaped chocolates. There is no note, no signature, no explanation, but there really doesn't need to be. He's forgotten it's the fourteenth--he often does. (He never forgets next month's fourteenth, but he often loses track of February.)
Popping one of the candies in his mouth (they are burnt...but...they were last year, too), he just shakes his head, digs a band-aid out of his desk, and goes back to his paperwork. Maybe the rest of the day won't be so bad after all.
04. Blush
Neither of them is prone to fluster, really. They grew up with far too much opposition and resistance to really let much of anything get to them. But romance has always evaded them as well, even after all this time. Renji's always been a rather fetching fellow, with his broad shoulders and contagious laugh, his sly grin and his genial nature. He's had his share of admirers over the years. Likewise Rukia, with her classic beauty and her big, captivating eyes, her strong, slender hands and air of confidence, has always had a follower or two in her day. Her status as an unwed member of the Kuchiki family didn't hurt that either. And neither of them ever paid these distant affections much mind. Any dating on Renji's part was recreational and rarely lasted long, and any courting of Rukia's hand was brushed off, albeit politely, with a graceful wave of those delicate fingers of hers.
It is at the softer, more gossamer things in life that they fumble. Yes, as adept as the two are at combat, kidou, zanjutsu or otherwise, they are both mostly gauche with affection. Renji's words are clumsy and his hand is adhered to the back of his neck whenever the subject of sentimentality is brought to the table, and Rukia's touch is inelegant and her eyes averted when her fingers move to thread into his. Her fair, milky skin is almost white against the darker almost olivey tone of his hands, and as he glances down to look at the braid of their fingers together, his eyes widen a little, and then he glances away with a soft bluster.
Her pale face reddens, though she often initiates the contact, and she always keeps her face low and the fingers of her free hand over the bridge of her nose until someone speaks. And somehow once the silence is broken then it's okay, and her blush fades, and they can move on with their lives.
He never blushes, but his ears are known to turn pink at the edges, and he always makes sure to wear a particularly bright and gaudy bandanna whenever he makes plans to meet Rukia outside of work.