From Renji's perspective. Implied renruki.

I do not own Bleach.

Your mind begins to sound like a broken record, endlessly spinning memories you don't feel like remembering back to the forefront. They start to pop and hiss in the dead of night and you've no strength to push them back any longer, and there, across the panels of your ceiling and the shadows draped over your walls, they play vivid and loud and demanding.

You don't ask the rest if they see them, too—if they wake with ice sunk under their skin and soot in their mouth and a hollow gnawing in the pit of their stomach. You don't ask if the life before snatches over this one, if they ever have to stop and center themselves again just to remind their thundering heart that none of it is real anymore.

Bruises begin to appear around your eyes and you don't try to hide them, grin carelessly when someone thinks to ask and brush it off as simple work hazard; they all know you spend more time clawing your way through life than living it and you've stopped trying to convince anyone otherwise. That is, after all, how you were born into this world—

"My mom died giving birth to me, you know," you remember saying to a wide-eyed waif, hair like midnight and skin white as bone. "Dunno where my dad went, but my mom went when I got here."

None of this really means anything, you don't try to paint yourself as tragedy and you don't say death flows in your veins, everyone here knows what loss is and you're not gonna pretend you're any special for it.

When you met her, your throat was burning with stomach twisted it was so empty, but all you could think was that you'd never seen anything more beautiful, and the first thing you really said to her was that the first person that might've loved you died doing it.

You don't hope she'll love you, too, you don't imagine yourself cupping her white, white cheeks in your dirty hands, you don't picture a future with her—you don't even bother picturing a future at all, you're kinda convinced you're not gonna make it to the end of the year.

She shared her food with you and curled up near you when it was cold and sometimes you almost felt less alone, but here's the thing—you could already feel the miles between the two of you, the pedigree that she still is and what a mutt you still are; there's a crick in your neck, you're looking up at her like she is the sky and she might as well be. There was something so refined about her, such a contrast to the rest of you urchins you might as well not even be from the same world. You took great pains to make sure there was food in her stomach and clothes on her back, scrubbed the floor where she'd slept when no one was around so that grime would not sully her beauty.

And that's just it, she was the most beautiful thing you ever saw and part of you is still convinced she always will be.

You don't say this to anyone, but there is something so comforting knowing someone else had felt the same pains you have, something so unifying about suffering the same plight—you know hunger the way a beast would, caught in the midst of winter with no sign of reprieve in sight.

You try not to imagine her as a bunny-rabbit, snow white in the winter cold—that in itself is a whole other hunger you are still not ready to indulge in.

But you don't ask the rest if they can still feel the chill in their bones, if their bodies still quake with a want that even the richest meat could never sate, if some days their tongues still tasted deprivation.

Some days you catch their eyes and you both just know—perhaps there is no escape at all.

You have your own home and your own room and your own bed and your own clothes and you eat as much as you please, and do not worry if you cannot afford the luxury, being who you are and doing what you do has granted you this much, you knew that before you'd even swung a sword at all. Your body thrums with content now and not from longing, and when you lie to sleep everything smells clean and good.

When your past begins to clamber at the walls of your mind, you feel almost detached some nights. They are drowned by soft robes and rice paper and ink and blade and absolute decadence and you know that you've earned this—that none of what you used to be makes sense in this world any longer.

You are only reminded of what once was when your dreams tilt toward midnight hair and porcelain skin and wide eyes. You are only shot back to skinny, dirty child when you are again faced with the expanse and splendor of the sky and its stars, shrunken down to size by how so very far away it all sill is.

You decide that's why you get out of bed at all, why you fold and crease your memories and slide them back into place every time, why you will not let go of them and will not let them overcome you.

You have clawed your way through life and you are done hiding that.

You will not let the next person that chooses to love you go the same way the first had.

"I'm sure that was her biggest regret, leaving you like that. I'm sure she fought just like you do every day," she'd said in response, bone white skin almost too smooth, almost too beautiful for his eyes to bear. "I think that's why you're the strongest of us. You keep fighting, even if you don't have a single chance at winning."

.x.

Hope you enjoyed.