Beautiful Disease

Heartbreaks

"Ya keep writing 'em an' even I won't be able ta keep ya safe."

Ren lacked the energy to grow angry. The room whirled around them and her body inched closer to overheating. These words haunted her, no matter what order they were strung or how differently he embellished them—they echoed in the back of her mind like a beacon overlain by sentences that told her father's stories.

"Do whatever you want," said Ren, "but don't start with this again. I'm tired of hearing it."

She wobbled to her office where she continued to work despite her fever, past the thick haze that hindered her ability to recount the order of words until sickness exhausted her. She slept slumped over the table.

Tetsuya startled her awake when he entered with a tray of breakfast.

Ren plucked the sheet of paper stuck to her cheek and smeared the ink across her face with a groan. Light poured into the room from the open windows, blinding her and warming her perspired skin. She remained as woozy as she had been last night.

"Did Gin leave this morning?" asked Ren.

"He left last night," he answered.

Oh. She looked to the ground and back up at Tetsuya's stupid face. Well, it doesn't matter.

She gathered her finished manuscript pages and stored them in a drawer with the others. It wasn't as if Gin would actually tell me why he wants to keep having the same argument so many times. She was working on a way to protect herself.

Ren sighed as she turned toward the drawer housing her father's re-penned manuscripts. Maybe I should stop. She looked around the grand room and shook the thought from her mind. Nope. Rich was good. Rich was definitely better. The manuscripts were important. They were also her father's ruin. Her father entrusted her with their protection, made sure that she understood why they needed to be kept safe, but she only recently began to make out the real reason as to why. The code hidden within the sea of stories was hard to decipher but easier to find as she reassembled page after page.

Even she was curious to know what their true purpose was. She assumed that it had to be important for someone to threaten her life.

She took breakfast at her table, but her appetite wasn't all there and had Tetsuya send word to her work that she'd be staying home.

Her fever lessened, but it had not left her and as the day progressed, her condition worsened. Her temperature rose and her chest ached. She coughed painfully into several balled-up tissues that she cast aside into a mountain of them. Tetsuya visited her bedroom frequently, picking up after her and doing as she asked. He went as far as to call a doctor when she started to complain about the chest discomfort and the doctor diagnosed her with acute bronchitis. She left medicine for Ren and suggested that she get enough rest.

Tetsuya brought in a humidifier to help ease her breathing symptoms. He left to the market for fresh fruit that he spent all afternoon cutting at her bedside, hoping to entice her appetite, but she remained uninterested. She stayed hydrated and slept.

Shuuhei arrived for a visit late in the evening and Ren wished he hadn't. She wasn't ready to see him after all that transpired between her and Gin, not that it looked like they were on good terms anymore, but apart from feeling lethargic, she was overcome with guilt. Frustration, too.

The lieutenant handed her a succulent and excused himself as he took a seat at her bedside. He asked the usual questions, all of them related to her condition and if she had gotten any rest.

"I don't want to keep you up," he said, a sheepish smile pulled at the ends of his lips, "but I wanted to make sure that you were doing okay. You rarely miss work."

Ren stared at the succulent. Tiny and green inside its container. It had a peculiar shape, seeming on the brink of flowering. "I wanted to see you, actually. You're not being a bother."

She loathed how he brightened at the sound of wanting to be seen. It had been so long since the last time they had spent any time together and she wished that Gin hadn't returned to her life. She had made good progress with Shuuhei. He was sweet. She enjoyed the simplicity of his company, the conversations that evolved into different branches of stories and never revolved around a single subject that they'd revisit only to start a fight. She and Shuuhei didn't argue, not over her being a target or her father's manuscripts.

It felt cruel to compare Shuuhei and Gin like it was painful to love Gin like she did.

Ren stumbled over words, not knowing when to start, but Shuuhei waited patiently. He relaxed in his seat, but soon the tension returned to his body as if he had become aware all at once of what would be happening.

"I'm in love with someone else," she said bluntly. "Our relationship has to end."

"Is it reciprocated?" he asked, dejected. He met her gaze briefly but dropped. Their relationship spanned a short time and it started to grow at the steady pace that they had set for it, which had been a new, thrilling experience for Ren.

It always felt in a hurry to do things. To attain optimal results and reactions from the people she targeted, she usually had to work fast to produce quick entertainment. Ren had never felt in control of herself when it came to Gin in comparison to the others. The relationship there had started out purely sexual. He sank his teeth in her and his venom seeped into her bloodstream. She had no say in the way her body reacted to him and she melted in him, allowed him the pleasure of exploring her body. She was curious, but control was pulled out from under her.

Ren acknowledged that with Shuuhei, given the time, she could find the balance her romantic life needed. It would be smarter to stay with him, see where they went and how much distance they could cover, but she had stopped making logical choices many years ago. She chose to be selfish.

"I don't believe that it is," said Ren.

Shuuhei observed her in silence as she fought against the sadness that shattered her.

"I understand," he said, rising from his seat.

"I'm sorry," she told him, her voice shattering with a sob. She covered her mouth to silence her own heartbreak, her muscles wound tight and her body shook. The emotion vibrated through her searching for an escape that she wasn't willing to give. "I shouldn't have dragged you into this. I'm sorry."

Ren felt the warmth of his hand atop her head and lifted her teary eyes to his face. There was no denying that he was hurt by the suddenness of her confession, but he forced a smile on his lips that contrasted the pain in his dark eyes.

"It's going to be okay," he said. "I promise."

Tetsuya shook her awake in the middle of the morning. The tears had dried in her eyes, her inflamed sinuses annoyed her, and her voice tumbled out of her cracked lips. She pushed his cold hands off her arms.

"What do you want?"

"I know who wrote the Red Book series! You won't believe it! I nearly shat myself—"

"You woke me up for this?" snapped Ren, too tired to care about horribly written erotica. She looked over her shoulder at the clock. "It's three in the morning!"

"Three in the morning—urgh, what are you an old woman now? What do you care what time it is?"

"I'm sick, you imbecile!" Ren shoved at Tetsuya's arm weakly. "Leave!"

"Sheesh! Forget me trying to be nice to you! I hope you choke on your own mucus!" Tetsuya stuck his tongue out at her on his way out and she hurled her pillow straight into his face. He snatched the pillow off the ground and begrudgingly took it with him, ignoring her protests.

Ren sank back into her futon and knocked out as soon as she put her head on the pillow.

She woke up in the morning realizing her mistake and sought Tetsuya out to shake a name out of him, but he evaded her. She searched the entire property for him and asked around. She holed herself up in her office and proceeded to make up for all the pages that she lost. This was how she planned to protect herself. She didn't expect to grow strong enough to wield her zanpakutō's shikai fast enough to consider it a line of defense, but she held out hope if she managed to secure the protection of the captain-commander.

Whoever wanted the manuscripts were aware of her deal with Central 46 and the more she thought about it, the less she felt comfortable turning them over to them.

Ren stopped writing after her hand cramped up. She left that evening on a walk since Tetsuya had no intention of returning that day. She stepped out into the vast garden and followed the stone path around its tree lilac-lined edges with their white blossoms flowering in clusters.

She paused to stare into the sky, bright and full of stars dusted across a black canvas. To be a star among billions, one person in an ocean of many, to be free of burden and live in a different skin—be someone other than Ren.

The crunch of gravel drew her eyes over her shoulder to Gin.

"Should ya be out an' 'bout already?"

He closed the distance between them and cupped her face in his hands. She closed her eyes and covered his hands with her own, their cool temperature a welcome to her hot skin.

Gin kissed her trembling lips and pressed his forehead against hers. She almost rolled her eyes, she felt too emotional. She looked at him, her eyes aching with tears.

He wrapped his arms around her tight, smothered her in his embrace, and held her for an eternity underneath the watchful eyes of stars.

That night, as she slept with her head, rested on his arm, she dozed off to the caress of his fingers against her temple and listened to his voice growing distant. His gibberish taking form the closer she was to sleep and caught the tail end of a confession.

"…with me?"

Ren forced herself to wake, her eyes meeting his in the dark. "Hmm?"

Gin offered her a strange smile, one so full of sadness it hurt her to see it, and repeated his words. "If I left, would you come with me?"

She reached up to touch his face, groggy with sleep, unable to tell if this was dream or reality. His skin felt real beneath her fingertips, firm yet soft. "And go where?"

He pressed his lips to her cheek and dragged her body closer to his, molding her to him. The heat pooling at the small of her back spread across the rest of her body. He nuzzled her neck, tickling her until she giggled. The laughter rushed from her lips as she pushed against his shoulders and he draped his leg over her own to keep her from squirming away.

"I said I wanna have sex," said Gin.

"That's not what you said!" Ren protested, pounding playfully over his back. "You said you wanted to go away!"

"With ya, somewhere far to have sex, really hot, sweaty sex until it feels like our skin will melt off," Gin said, sliding between her legs. He took her hands and pinned them next to her head. She couldn't say that she wasn't intrigued by his proposal, but she swore he was talking about something completely different. "We can start here and work our way through the rest of yer house. Imagine what yer cousin would say if she saw us goin' at it in front of her door."

She laughed, obnoxiously loud. "You're being ridiculous!"

Gin raised his upper body up, hovering over her, his groin grinding against her. A shudder shot through her, the twitch of his cock excited her.

"Can we?"

Ren nodded. "Kiss me."

He leaned forward, but she covered his mouth, stared at him quizzically—one eyebrow raised. "Please tell me, The Collector didn't find out you wrote a trilogy of terrible erotica?"

"That's rude, I think I'm a much better writer than Lieutenant Hisagi."

"What?"

"What?" echoed Gin.

Thank you for the reviews!

Please forgive the time between chapters.

There is little movement in this chapter, but I deemed it important enough to have it be standalone. I hope to accelerate events with the chapters that follow. Of course, I am going to try to do so without it disturbing the flow of the story, but yeah, wish me luck.

I hope the next chapter won't take as long to write.

Thank you for reading!