Over on Tumblr, I stupidly volunteered to write Renji-related drabbles upon request for his birthday. I got a million of 'em, and did my best to get as many done as I could, although admittedly, I still have a few to go. Anyway, that's why so many of the next few are birthday-themed. Enjoy! P.S. I always take requests, I am never not taking requests, it's just most of the time, I get them done in some sort of geological time frame.

Anonymous asked: oooooo, Renji drabbles! you've mentioned before how you suspect that Renji and Shuuhei were a thing once upon a time... is it possible you can write a drabble where they're on a date together? They're only two of the hottest guys in the realm

Abarai Renji was on a date.

He'd been on a few dates in his life, disastrous occasions when Momo had stuffed him in a yukata and sent him out with some fresh-scrubbed, extremely nice girl she had dredged up somewhere. The girls would talk and talk and steal glances at his tattoos and guilt would well up in his chest until he wanted to vomit and at the end, they would kiss him on the cheek and he would make it a point to never see them again.

Today, he was wearing yesterday's uniform and wandering around a flea market in a weird, eclectic Seireitei neighborhood that he'd never been to before, watching Hisagi Shuuhei root through a bin of Living World automotive parts. His boyfriend, Hisagi Shuuhei.

Renji had slept with Shuuhei enough times that he no longer kept count. Shuuhei cooked him dinner at least twice a week and Renji would bring over beers or sake as his contribution. They usually sat next to each other at the bar, and he'd throw his arm around Shuuhei's shoulders and Shuuhei would put a hand on his knee and it was very comfortable like that. Renji had started keeping a toothbrush at Shuuhei's place, and then decided that he didn't like sharing Shuuhei's hair gel, and now probably three quarters of the junk Shuuhei's bathroom was actually Renji's. People would constantly call his phone asking for Shuuhei, because Shuuhei's phone was perpetually out of battery, not that Renji's was ever at more than a single digit's worth of charge.

So last week, when Shuuhei asked him if he wanted to be boyfriends and Renji said "no" and then Shuuhei asked him which part of this he wanted to stop doing, he said "none of it" and then he was forced to concede that maybe he did want to be boyfriends and now they were on a date.

It wasn't so bad.

The weather was nice, and Renji was eating a taiyaki at 10am, which was, in his opinion, the very acme of gratuitous self-indulgence. Shuuhei had bought it for him because he said "he looked extra cute in the morning" and also, he'd found some money in his pocket that he forgot he had.

"Oi, Renji, do you know what a spark plug actually looks like?" Shuuhei shouted from neck deep in his bucket of parts. It occurred to Renji that Shuuhei usually called him Abarai in public, but maybe first names were part of this new regime they were now operating under.

"I do not," Renji admitted. "Maybe we could try to find one on the motorbike and take it out and bring it with us next time. You have that book with the diagrams, so we can probably figure out where to find it."

"Ah, you're so smart!" Shuuhei exclaimed and Renji blushed because no one ever said that to him, maybe not even once in his entire afterlife.

The Guilt curled in Renji's stomach, slow and throbbing, but it wasn't choking, consuming, like it used to be. He had always thought the Guilt was for Rukia- that he was betraying her, cheating on her, somehow. But he didn't owe Rukia anything, to be honest, any more than she owed him. She was living a fantastic life somewhere, probably having pitted cherries placed directly in her mouth while someone else painted her fingernails. She sure wasn't waiting around for him to show up and shout his undying devotion to her. In fact, he could practically imagine the horrified face she would make at him if she found out he'd been pining over her.

No, the Guilt was for the other girls, Momo's pretty, doe-eyed friends that he was never, ever going to fall in love with, no matter how much they flipped their hair at him. His heart was burnt down to a cinder- a black, dusty thing, too hot to touch, and in danger of falling to ash if someone were to try. You could only love for so hard, for so long without getting anything back. Then, you started burning yourself up instead, from the inside out.

That had been a long time ago, though. Even if he still missed Rukia like hell, there were other good parts of life these days. His fights with Ikkaku were getting pretty evenly matched these days. He even got to spar with the Kenpachi once in a while, which was both exciting and flattering and then, two minutes later, deeply, deeply painful. He liked being Sixth Seat, not just because it paid well, but because he liked working with the unseated guys, liked teaching them how to be real swordsmen, not just loud goons. After years of Yumichika making him rub flowery smelling stuff on his face and in his hair, there was a pretty good looking guy staring back at him when he looked in the mirror. A guy who felt good about looking good, a guy who now knew how to pick out his own flowery smelling face goops.

"I think," he had explained to Shuuhei, the only person to whom he had ever explained the burnt-up cinder heart theory, "that there might be a little chunk of it, like the size of my thumb, that's not all the way toasted, just maybe really tough and chewy, like beef jerky."

And Shuuhei had looked him in the eyes, real soft-like, and said, "Pal, your tiny little dried up beef jerky heart probably has more love in it than most people have in their entire body. You have been up front with me, which I respect a lot, and I'm willing to take my chances anyway."

Shuuhei currently was surveying the street like an explorer deciding which path he wanted to take through a jungle. "You wanna go see the leatherwork stall? They had some sweet wrist cuffs last time, really gorgeous tooling."

"Why do you always want to look at stuff that you can't afford?" Renji groused. He'd been trying to start saving again, since he got his raise, something he hadn't done since he was at the Fifth. He couldn't decide which it was that was making him more grouchy- having to put limits on his expenses, or how little was actually piling up in the bank account he'd opened. He wasn't even sure what he was saving for. It just seemed like money was something a functional adult should have. He wasn't exactly sure he would classify himself as a functional adult, but it was something to aspire to.

Shuuhei stretched, and rested his hands on the back of his head. "Sometimes it's fun to just browse," he shrugged. "You're so practical, Renji, you should let your imagination out a little, once in a while."

Renji's face must have done something stupid, because Shuuhei quickly followed up with, "Things don't always have to pan out to be worth dreaming of. C'mon, I know you're dead jealous of those flashy goggles Iba's been wearing lately."

Renji wrinkled his nose because he was. Iba's new shades were incredibly cool and incredibly expensive, too. Iba had offered to let him try them on, and Renji had said no because he was almost positive he would look better in them than Iba and he didn't want to have to go around thinking about that all the time.

"We can go to the used book place instead," Shuuhei offered. Shuuhei was really good at hopping off subjects that Renji was sensitive about. He'd probably been doing it for a while, but Renji had just gotten around to noticing. "It's all crummy, falling-apart paperbacks, but they're pretty cheap, plus I have a bunch of credit, because I trade mine in when I'm done with 'em."

"Ah, that sounds nice," Renji, who had a great love for crummy, falling-apart paperbacks, replied. "But let's swing by the leather place, too." He crumpled up the paper from his taiyaki and threw it in a high arc into a nearby wastecan. Then wiped his hand on his hakama, and held out his hand, flexing his fingers obnoxiously. "I bet I would look good in wrist cuffs."

Shuuhei grinned and immediately lowered his hands from his head so he could grab Renji's. "You would look so good in wrist cuffs."

And off they went, together.