Simple Like Tea

Renji’s feet seemed to be on the verge of tripping over one another in his haste to get to the tea house. He kept his pace to a dignified walk – well, dignified so long as no one was looking – but his heart was racing wildly enough to give his feet a run for their money. Five days, and they had been anxious, exhausting days. His emotions had gone for a rollercoaster ride during those five days, with his heart hammering in his chest for Rukia one minute and heavy enough to sink a ship for Reiko the next. Now the five days were over, and he was finally going to see her again, the one that made him calm. The heaviness came on him again and he tried to shake it off.

Five days, a lifetime to be away. Such a short time for a lifetime to fit into, he thought, but no matter, not anymore.

When the teahouse finally came into view, the lights were out. His heart sank. He had hoped somehow that she would still wait for him every night. Now that he was so close, he could maintain the dignified – dignified, dammit! – pace no longer. The pounding of his feet echoed around the empty street, the hollow sound bouncing back to him from the dark windows of the shop made darker by a sudden sense of dread. Dread or no dread, he was there at last, and no amount of guilt or shame was going to stop him.

Swallowing audibly, he looked up at her window. The curtains were fluttering in the night breeze like a secret flag she had set up just for him, to let him know she was here. He felt the heat rise in his cheeks with embarrassment at the thought. What a stupid thing to think. He needed to get a grip. Just five days.

Leaping up to the sill, he landed silently beside the small flower pot that held the zombie flower and peered into the room, giving his eyes time to adjust to the dimness inside. After the brightness of the full moon outside, the inside of her apartment seemed pitch black.

But when his eyes adjusted, he frowned at the sight.

Reiko wasn’t in her bed, but she stood beside it, clutching the corner of her bedsheet in her little fist. She was looking at something obscured by the screen, and he thought it might have been her reflection in the mirror. Her face was slack and emotionless, though her lips seemed to be moving, almost as though she were praying, or talking to herself. Renji’s breath was caught in his throat. He found himself suddenly lacking the courage to speak. But gods she looked beautiful.

Suddenly blinking rapidly and shaking her head slightly, Reiko seemed to suddenly notice where she was. She looked at the sheet clutched in her fist with mild surprise, and it was only then that she looked up at Renji, crouching on the window sill. He felt his cheeks redden at being caught staring and snapped his jaw shut – how long had he sat there with his mouth hanging open like some kind of idiot? – and he was grateful for the dark for at least hiding his blush.

“Renji,” she croaked, her voice hoarse as though she had been crying, or simply not talking for a very long time. He wondered which it had been, and then he wondered if it was his fault.

He stepped carefully into the apartment, watching carefully where he put his feet for an excuse to look away and pull himself together. “Reiko, I can explain,” he began, surprised at how calm and steady he sounded. But as soon as he looked up at her again, he found himself fumbling for his next thought.

“Renji,” she repeated quietly, and her grip on the sheet tightened. He heard the soft rustle of cloth and the creak of her weight on the bed when he looked at his feet again. He couldn’t face her. He was a horrible man, the worst kind of man. Reiko was sweet and kind and every inch a lady, and he had shared her bed while in love with another woman. If she knew, she'd hate him. Suddenly, his heart ached for Rukia. Stupid heart…

“I was on an assignment,” he said calmly, forcing a smile onto his face. Rukia was the past. He would dedicate the present to Reiko, no matter what his heart thought it was doing. “It was an emergency, the captain gave me no notice, such a pain in the ass,” he grunted, scratching his head sheepishly.

The silence stretched, and then, in a strange voice he had never heard before, “So he was telling the truth. I didn’t believe him, but now I know he was telling the truth.”

He was so shocked, he actually looked at her face, and it was like looking at a marble statue. A stone showed more emotion than this, a piece of cardboard was more expressive. “’He’?”

Reiko suddenly got up and walked past him – walked around him as though he were an inconveniently placed piece of furniture! – and he heard the sound of running water as she filled her teapot. He spun around to face her, foreboding rising up his throat like bile.

“Who is ‘he’? Who have you been talking to?”

She didn’t look at him. She was looking through her cupboards for something, probably one of her blends, and he wanted to grab her and shake her until her teeth rattled inside her head. Making tea now, being like this, scaring the shit out of him. His fingers twitched, and he had to make a fist to keep his hands from reaching out and grabbing her all on their own. “Your captain came to see me while you were gone,” she said into one of the cupboards, her voice cracking again. Had she been crying? Was she sick?

Suddenly Renji absorbed what she had said and felt all the air rush out of him. He couldn’t have been more breathless if he had been kicked by an ox. “Kuchiki Taichou?!” he bellowed, taking a step towards her before she looked at him with cold flat eyes. Now that she was close to the window, he saw they were bloodshot. Either she hadn’t been sleeping, or she had been crying. His heart clenched.

“He told me all about it, your great love for his little sister. Kuchiki Rukia. You came to me right after she got married. Isn’t that right?”

Renji’s jaw was clenched so tight, he couldn’t have opened it to save his life right then.

He had never seen eyes that lifeless before. It was worse than a mod soul. “Now that I know the truth, it seems so clear. You used me as a rebound, Renji.”

Mutely, he shook his head. She couldn’t mean that!

“You wanted someone that could comfort you after the woman you loved got married.”

“No…” it sounded more like a groan than a word.

“You just wanted an easy lay to get your ego fix after your first choice gave you the shaft!”

“No!” He was making such a tight fist, his knuckles were popping. The blood was roaring in his ears and his vision was blurring. His chest hurt, his entire body hurt, but he was throbbing with the aching need for her, throbbing with the desire he felt to love her, to hold her, to kiss her and be inside her. He felt feverish with frenzy, like he had been caught in a snowstorm and was blind, with all his other senses heightened and burning. He thought he could hear her heart beating, and it sounded rapid and unsteady like his.

He took a sudden step towards her but her small hands were surprisingly firm when she put them against his chest and pushed him away. He staggered for a moment, feeling lost, and he thought he saw tears in her eyes. Screaming wordlessly, she turned around to face the wall where the shrine for her grandparents was and heaved the teapot she had been holding right at the wall. She stood stunned for a second, then turned around and flung the tiny tea cups against the wall in handfuls, pulling them out of cupboards with mismatched saucers and little imperfect pots. The sound of each individual piece shattering against the wall or the floor was loud and strangely distinct, and she didn’t stop until one wayward piece, a pot without a handle, knocked over the pictures of her grandparents, spilling cold tea from the little cup she had set on the shrine all over the table top so that it dripped onto the hardwoord floor with a deafening thud-thud-thud that was too loud in the silence that followed.

Her shoulders shook where she leaned against the counter next to the sink, her back turned to him, and Renji took an involuntary step back, away from her. “I can’t be with you, Renji!” she shouted hoarsely without turning to face him. Reiko, shouting! It felt like centuries ago he had thought he could never imagine her shouting. “I can’t ever be with you again, do you understand?! I’m in love with Kuchiki Byakuya, and I’m going to marry him!”

As though that outburst had drained the last of her energy, she sunk to her knees, panting and hiccupping, too exhausted to even cry properly.

Renji stared. In love with the captain. Reiko, his Reiko, in love with the captain.

“He comforted me while you weren’t here, and he was so kind and understanding, and I love him for it. And he loves me, and that’s more than I can ask from anyone.” Her voice cracked on every word, but still, she wouldn’t look at him. “It’s more than I can ask from you.”

He jumped up onto the sill and flung himself out the window, hitting the ground at a dead run that he didn’t alter or slow a hair until he was far enough away that the smell, the thick scent of mint and confusion and the fog that came with it were a distant memory. How had everything changed in five days? He had wanted to tell her about Rukia later, in his own words, in his own way, in the future when talking about Rukia would be easy. He had always imagined that by then, his heart would be Reiko’s completely, and Rukia would have lost the power to unwittingly and unwillingly destroy them. But even as he thought, his heart raced with the thought of Rukia in a way that it hadn’t begun to race for Reiko just yet. He was a fool, a stone blind fool, and he didn’t even understand fully what had happened yet. His captain had come to the real world and seduced her. That must have been it.

He was a fool, a fool for ever thinking he could be happy.

But why? Why would Kuchiki Byakuya come all the way to the real world just to seduce a human girl? Just to hurt him? Just to make him suffer? Because he had been angry at him for loving Rukia? How had he known about Renji’s feelings for Rukia anyhow? But no answers came to him, and he couldn’t form a coherent thought. His vision was blurry and his chest ached.

He kept running.

***

Reiko sat on the floor for a long time after Renji was gone. When the sky started to turn pink, she got up, supporting most of her weight on the counter, and stumbled across the room to the bed behind the screens. A sharp pain shot up her right leg, and she cried out, throwing herself onto her knees the rest of the distance to the bed. Looking over her shoulder, she gripped the piece of porcelain sticking out of her heel and carefully pulled it out in one piece. She tossed it aside and climbed the rest of the way into her bed, gripping the sheets that still held Renji’s smell to her nose.

Reiko looked at the mirror over her dresser, not at her reflection, but at the letter she had taped to the mirror. Kuchiki Byakuya had not lied to her. In the envelope he had left her, she had found a small slip of paper with the address and telephone number of her mother, along with a short but clear letter explaining who Kuchiki Rukia was and what Renji had done for her, along with the a small mention at the very end, written almost as a post script, saying that Renji had gone to her home as soon as he had found out about her pregnancy, and that he was there, had been there for days, living under the same roof while her husband was away on duty. She hadn’t believed it at first, perhaps a mental game to make her hate him, perhaps something political to further his own cause, whatever it might be. But Renji had radiated it out of his pores, the guilt, the shame, the fear of being exposed. One look at him, and she had known.

She realized her lips were moving as she read it to herself again, something she had done so often since first seeing it she was almost convinced she had it memorized. She closed her eyes to shut the words out, but they were there in the darkness behind her lids, and her lips still moved as she read them, making each word real and painful. Renji was in love with Rukia. Rukia had gotten married and Renji had been hurt by it. His heart beloned to her. Renji had never loved Reiko.

Now, he never would.




TBC


AN/ Well, I rewrote this chapter about five or six times, no joke, before finally settling on this version of events to follow the tense Reiko/Byakuya interactions. Even I feel bad for Renji at this point, and repeatedly telling myself that he's a fictional character that I'm writing into a fiction of my own creation doesn't make it easier. I think I'm screwed up in the head.

Anyhow, I'm really excited about where it's heading. I still don't see a clear ending, but I have some big ideas about what's going to happen next. I would love if you all stayed with through this, and kept on reading. Thanks for those who reviewed, and thank you for those who came to take a gander. Seeing the hits go up makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside ^^

In parting, I'd like to ask a favor. If at any point during the story I've made you go ":'( OH NOES!" or ":O OMFG!" please let me know. At some point during writing this I've found myself gasping in shock or dismay, and I want to know just how weird I am.

Thanks again for staying tuned. More coming soon! ^_^

P.S. THANK THE GREAT BIG ENTITY IN THE SKY! I was soooooo uber worried about keeping Byakuya IC. Thank you so much for thinking I did so, eva24. *phew*