Sometimes when she closes her eyes, Rukia hears the sound of children playing, laughing, their voices echoing off the colorless cracked walls and dusty alleys of one of the roughest districts of South Rukongai, Inuzuri. One of those high voices is her own, and the lower one is Renji's. She can pick out Atsushi, Toshi, Kenta, and some others, but besides Renji, those three are the ones she knows best.
"We were all in love with you, I think." Renji says, hugging her closer as they lay side-by-side on his futon. They're both still damp from bathing. His hair is hanging loose and in the dimness looking almost the color of dried blood, since it's wet. She realizes he is trying to make her smile. "As much as kids can be in love, I guess." He can usually tell when her thoughts have drifted into their shared past.
It was an awful time in their lives, but she does have good memories. "Remember when Toshi found that blackberry bramble in the woods on the edge of Inuzuri?" she asks. "He said it was a present for me." Toshi had been her favorite after Renji, but only because at the time she liked teasing Renji more.
Renji's white kimono is loose on his shoulders and she presses her cheek against the smooth, hard expanse of his tattooed chest. He smells of rosemary soap from their bath, and a little of sandalwood from the clothes chest; her favorite though is that warm male scent he always has. Rukia wonders again why he had to go and get so damn big; it makes her feel like a little rabbit curled in the limbs of a tiger sometimes. He loves her, but a tiger is what it is.
"But you shared it with the rest of us anyway. My head still hurts," Renji chuckles. Her kimono is open, and slipping a huge callused hand under the silk, he strokes her side, her breast, her belly and hip, all of the way down to her cradle her rear. She shivers, sighing into his skin, the pleasant sensations stoking her nerves.
"How were we supposed to know half of the berries were fermented on the bush?" she says, smiling up at him. She likes how his sharp features are softened when he lets his hair down like this. It almost hides those scary tattoos that Renji told her Zabimaru insisted he get, but that she knows he also really likes.
"They tasted good. Really good," he sighs. "I can still taste them. The seeds were stuck in my teeth forever."
It makes her want to pick her teeth just at his mentioning it. "I know. I think the old lady who used to live out that way must have died, otherwise they would have been harvested," Rukia says, thoughtful, wondering what ever did happen to her.
People could disappear from that place and sometimes the loss wouldn't be noticed for weeks, if it was noticed at all. The harsh outer districts were meant to circulate souls back into the living world quickly, but this fact didn't make existence there any less brutal.
"She must have, or we would all have been chased off with a rake," Renji snorts, and pulls away and rolls onto his back. He's more than familiar with being beaten within an inch of his life, for stealing even tiny amounts of food.
"That too." Rukia pouts at him for moving, but he is looking at the beams of the ceiling with his arms behind his head and not at her. She resists her usual tickle attack, sensing his mood shift.
"Heh. I wonder if they were reborn near each other. I know they wouldn't remember being here, but I'd feel better if they were all friends again in the living world." Renji admitted.
It was just as impossible to know where a spirit would end up in its new life, as it was to discover where they were sorted to in the districts of Rukongai when they arrived. Seireitei was bureaucratic, but more in regards to getting the dead into the spirit world, not getting them out. Wishful thinking indeed.
"Maybe some poor lady has all three of them in her family. They died pretty close together during the epidemic. Atsushi was the first, so he would be the eldest," Rukia muses.
Renji looks back over at her, a crooked smile on his lips, and a lock of his hair falls over his face so he has to push it back. "All in the same family, huh? That would be pretty cool, but who can say."
He leans down and kisses her forehead. Rukia scoots up far enough that she can kiss his mouth, trying to dispel the sadness she sees lurking like a black cloud behind his eyes. There's something more bothering him, and she wishes that the conversation had never taken this turn.
"Renji?" she says, as she draws back and looks him in the eyes again. He's accepting her affection but is not returning it with any enthusiasm, which is unusual for him.
"Yeah?"
"Do you still believe they died because of you?" she asks. The last time they spoke of it, both of them were in the academy. Not just learning to fight, learning about reiatsu, learning about the nature of shinigami and souls with strong spiritual power.
He's quiet for a long time, and then says, "I try not to think about it." His cool, grave expression tells her he is though. Now that they are together, now that the war is over and the world has settled down, there's time for him to mull it over in his mind. All the old shadows and monsters of their past creep up to make themselves known.
The summer their friends died, an outbreak of a deadly fever tore through Inuzuri. Atsushi died first, having always been the smallest and frailest. Then a week later big, thick-featured Kenta and skinny, scar-faced Toshi were both gone within hours of each other.
She and Renji never even caught a chill, their bodies likely fighting it off by instinctively drawing extra reiatsu to them - right when their friends were at their weakest.
That wasn't the worst of it, however.
Many years later, Renji's zanpakuto spirit manifested as a nue, a creature renowned in story and legend for being a harbinger of disease and ill-fortune. It was hard to say whether Renji's maturing strength allowed Zabimaru to influence the world around them at such an early point, but it was not at all unheard of.
They understand now that souls who do not have spiritual powers to defend themselves with, have to exist separate from shinigami for reasons that extend beyond class.
"We did not know," she says. "There was no way we could have, and now you can suppress your reiatsu."
"Yeah... I still hate it. I wish I could have at least done something more for them then. I was the strongest, I was supposed to protect everyone," he says, his raspy voice almost a whisper.
She tweaked his nose in irritation. "You are starting to sound like that idiot we left back in Karakura. Don't get mopey, or I will kick your ass, like I did his."
"Ow! Rukia!"
"Do you think it is any different for me? I was not able do anything for them either, Renji. It was a horrible time, in a despicable town, and we were lucky just to survive. Maybe in another life we will all be together again, but for now we have to live with this one. I know it is hard, and I am sorry that I remind you of them, just like you remind me. You have to let it go." She immediately wonders if she's said too much, but knows she had to say it.
Renji ponders her words for a moment, then slides his arm under her stomach. In a smooth motion he rolls Rukia over on top of him like she's weightless. To him, maybe she is. "There's one thing I've always been certain of, you know. The only good to ever come out of that place is you."
He's said this to her before, and his serious expression makes her want to laugh aloud like she did then. This time she doesn't, beaming down at him instead. It's pleasing to her that he's brought his attentions back around, right where they belong. Doubly pleasing, is that he seems to be remembering why they have come to his quarters in the first place.
Rukia leans in to kiss him, coaxing his mouth open for a deeper one, only breaking it off when he starts trying to take over. "Oh? I definitely think you are good for something," she says, resting her forehead against his, as she reaches down to loosen the sash on his kimono.
She wants to forget just as badly as he does, but for now perhaps it's better to give him what little solace she can in her body. Soon, they both were living in the moment, the anguishes of the past settling back into the sediment of memory. Rukia hears only Renji as they lay in the dark, the shifts in his breathing, her name from his lips.