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Consolation Prize (of Victory)	By : blackfox1 Category: Bleach > Het - Male/Female Views: 5760 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Bleach, any of the characters mentioned here and I'm certainly not in this for the money.

Chapter List
- 8
- 9
- 10
Consolation Prize

Interlude 4: A Symphony for Second Fiddles

In which the truth hurts. A lot.
Renji leaned against the bedpost, a spot he’d occupied for the last hour or so. The metal dug into his back, but the uncomfortable position fit his uncomfortable mood. Nemu, Karin and Szayel would show up soon and he needed to have his thoughts sorted out before Nemu created the Kido circle.

His back had healed, finally and he’d recovered from the damage he’d taken at Szayel’s less-than-willing hands. He’d carry the scars, but there were worse punishments and Unohana had used some sort of medicine on it that sped up the normal healing process without using Kido. The children weren’t thrilled about the lack of piggyback rides, but it did give Renji an excuse to sit the two of them down and explain that they were getting too big to ride around on his shoulders all of the time. Vindula looked devastated, until Renji cannily mentioned that Ajuga-chan no longer used her father as her main mode of transportation. Abisara simply shrugged and said that it was too hard for him to carry around disease samples while riding on his ‘Ji-ji’s’ back. Renji did nothing to dispute the boy’s assessment.

Once he’d made it ‘home’ from the 4th Division, accompanied by a note from Unohana-Taichou and a bottle of some truly righteous painkillers, Szayel had asked Nemu to put the children to bed early. Renji suspected that was to get her out of earshot as well, which told him that his ‘master’ had been a little less-than-forthcoming with the details of today’s meeting. It also told him the Espada might just feel a bit of guilt. While Renji’s actions hadn’t been Szayel’s fault, a couple of those blows had done some deeper damage to a few muscles in his back. It would be a good two months before the twinges and itching of the healing wounds really went away.

The argument wasn’t the epic insult-laden diatribe he expected. Szayel wearily informed him that because Karin wasn’t at the meeting, it wasn’t likely that he would have been punished in the first place, especially when he was in the preliminary stages of an investigation. He’d deduced that Aizen had merely wanted to use Vindula as a reminder of his position as well as the consequences of failure. In his opinion, Renji’s rash act had been unnecessary.

Renji’s comeback, asking if Szayel was willing to bet hard money or his daughter’s wings on that, made the Espada pause. In Renji’s mind, his actions had spared two people, Szayel and Vindula, some serious pain, as Szayel hadn't felt a damned thing when Aizen took out his anger on Renji’s back. He’d also pointed out that, from his perspective, Aizen had been in the mood for some entertainment. He’d met plenty of people in the Inuzuri whose idea of a good time involved blood and suffering in some way, shape or form. Aizen had had that same look in his eye Renji had grown up to recognize and avoid if at all possible.

When Szayel had looked away, pissed but unable to deny it, Renji got up, declared he was going to bed with the help of a few more pills and walked out of the Espada’s private quarters. If it was a ‘win’ for Renji, it certainly didn’t feel like it. ‘Wins’ didn’t weren't accompanied by bandages, stitches and a dreamless sleep aided by anesthetics.

July’s heat faded into October’s cool and October’s cool had given way to December’s biting cold. After six months of on-and-off searching, digging through records, comparing the one clue they had to countless reiatsu records and patterns, Szayel had suggested that they widen the search to see if anyone had recently used the purloined Quincy weapons in the Living World. As the Espada had explained to Aizen in a report, once someone had something they’d taken, the temptation to use the stolen items would become too much for the thief to resist. If they could pinpoint where and when a Quincy used them, he and his team would have a much easier time of finding the culprit.

Unfortunately, the thief either couldn’t or wouldn’t use the weapons, much to Szayel’s frustration. Half-a-year had gone by and the Science and Research Division had detected zero instances of reishi manipulation traceable to any known Quincy techniques. Whoever had them was sitting tight on the stolen goods.

Seele Schnieder, three Ginto capsules, and the Uryuu’s five-pointed Quincy cross vanished, seemingly into thin air. While Aizen wasn’t pleased with that news, the lack of activity also helped mitigate any fallout. Szayel had promoted the ‘family’ theory that Renji had pulled from his ass on short notice. To the redhead’s discomfort, once Rin had explained to him how to read the reiatsu signatures they’d dredged up from the archives, it occured to Renji that they might have stumbled upon the truth in the midst of spinning a lie the size of Hokkaido about his late friend.

In the end, because of the uncanny resemblance to other recorded Quincy reiatsu signatures and because Szayel had little else to show for months of investigation, the scientist handed over a final report stating the weapons had been taken by a Quincy, possibly a distant relative of the former owner, who had managed to track the things down over a decade after Uryuu’s passing and made off with them. Szayel’s explanation for the Garganta used to get back to the Living World was a little more tenuous. His minions couldn’t scrape together a complete reiatsu signature from the spot where it opened and closed in Hueco Mundo to identify the Arrancar that created it. They could barely tell where the passage led, a spot on the island of Okinawa, hundreds of miles south of the mainland. Szayel had thrown up his hands, speculating that the thief had forced some unlucky Adjuchas to open a gate and then killed the thing after leaving Hueco Mundo. Szayel chalked up the ‘calling card’ aspect to ‘Quincy Pride’ or ‘some other human nonsense’, as he referred to it. To Renji, it seemed more like a middle finger waved in Szayel’s face, but he kept his opinion to himself.

What floored Renji was that Aizen appeared to have bought the whole thing. There was no further talk of retrieving the weapons either. While the bastard wasn’t pleased that they were now as good as irretrievable, their theft wouldn’t really do anything to impede Aizen’s current dominion over the Seireitei, so the matter was settled.

Szayel pulled Renji off of the Quincy search in the archives once his wounds had healed. Karin hadn’t been thrilled with his method of distracting Aizen, and told him so in no uncertain terms, but had agreed with him privately about Aizen’s penchant for bloodshed. The scars would take years to fade to the white lines that gave away his other past injuries, but as long as they didn’t slow him down, he could live with them. On a rare day off, he’d sought out the shop where, decades ago, he’d first started his love affair with ink, and he set about repairing the damage to his tribal markings.

Like most places in the higher-numbered Districts, this shop and its environs were essentially unchanged by Aizen’s so-called Victory. The clientele were the sort of people that decent folk in the lower-numbered Districts tended to avoid on principle. However, it was clean and the proprietor knew his shit. The artist picked up his needle, took one look at Renji’s back and winced. He’d asked the redhead if he wanted to cover up the worst of it. Renji had declined, telling him just to re-ink the ruined areas of the tattoos already in place. The guy shrugged and got to work. ‘Chicks dig scars’ he’d said and Renji supposed that was meant to be some kind of condolence.

He’d have to explain the marks to Nel. She probably wouldn’t be too happy with him, but then, he wasn’t entirely happy about a few things himself.

Yumichika’s warning and his observation that Renji was terrible at the spy business kept coming back to haunt him at odd times, usually while he was taking care of one or both of the twins. The idea that information he’d passed to Nel might have come back to hurt one of the children, even if that wasn’t the intent of the Los Noches raid, put a couple of knots in his stomach that he was having some trouble undoing. Maybe if Nel could just bloody explain a few things to him, it would make his role a bit easier. If Yoruichi’s group had been behind the raid, Renji wanted to know where on Earth they’d dug up a living Quincy, since Uryuu’s line had ended with his death and the making of the Ouken.

If they hadn’t done it, if for some strange reason Szayel’s stitched-together theory held water, then…well, he had no answer for that. Not a good one, anyway. Taking a longer view, could a Quincy using those weapons cause even more trouble with the shaky stability between the worlds? There’d been a reason the Shinigami had finally given up on negotiations and whittled down the number of those who could literally destroy all of the Realms with their actions. One Quincy, armed with Uryuu’s weapons might not be a problem under normal circumstances. However, with Aizen’s unworthy carcass decorating the throne and the current imbalance, that same Quincy destroying souls willy-nilly might pose a serious threat. If someone like Renji could see the potential danger of a competent Quincy with an arsenal, surely Yoruichi could see the problem too.

If only he could get some real answers. He was so tired of being kept in the dark, supposedly for his own good.

He knew he had no reason to feel resentful. He was a soldier, had been one for a very, very long time and ten cracks across the back with a whip should have been something he ought to have shrugged off by now, especially since he’d instigated the incident leading up to them. Intellectually, rationally, he knew he wasn’t the one calling the shots as far as Yoruichi’s schemes, but he had to wonder about the tactical advantage a few obsolete and unusable weapons offered, in comparison to rescuing a few of the former Taichou and Fukutaichou held in captivity. It had been nearly three years since he’d had a meaningful conversation with Yumichika, three years since he’d passed along information that he thought for certain the dark-skinned woman leading the Escapees would use to tear at Aizen’s twisted power structure in the Seireitei.

So far, the Los Noches raid, if Yoruichi was behind it, was the only bit of progress he’d seen. Renji would be the first to question the effectiveness of that escapade. If he was going to be a spy, he was going to start getting some answers in exchange for his work. The whole ‘you can’t reveal under torture what you don’t know’ thing wasn’t going to cut it anymore. From what he’d seen, Aizen seemed to favor torturing loved ones over torturing people directly and it wouldn’t matter if he had information to give or not.

He could almost see Yoruichi’s smirk now, complete with a toss of her long, purple pony tail and a bit of fang in her smile.

You ARE getting something in exchange for your work, Moocher-san. Isn’t being Claimed and protected and fucked senseless by a beautiful, powerful woman reward enough? You can’t say you aren’t getting something of value, Abarai.

If by reward, she meant not having to bare his ass for Szayel, sure. That was a plus, though that might have been a break for Szayel as well. The Espada seemed to be skittish about anyone, especially a male, touching him in an overly familiar manner. Karin, Nemu and his children were the sole exceptions to that rule. He couldn’t really blame the pink-haired Espada for that though, if what Nemu had told him about Aizen’s preferred form of punishing Szayel was true. Between that and Grimmjow’s current Claim on him, Renji was surprised he didn’t cringe each time Rin handed him a report.

Renji shook himself, getting his thoughts back on track before they could go down a path he didn’t need to be taking right now. He kept his focus on the woman he’d be seeing shortly, if the clock on the wall had the accurate time.

Aside from having no idea if his efforts were doing any good, Renji found himself troubled by the fact that we was enjoying this aspect of his association with Nel, maybe a little too much. He thought he’d settled this with himself after their first time together.

Her Claim was supposed to be a way of hiding him, not something that comforted him in the middle of the night. It and the painkillers had mitigated the worst of the physical hurt from the whipping he’d taken. It buffered and shored up his emotional recovery as he’d dragged himself out of the pit he’d tossed himself into after finding out what Yammy had done with his unthinking shell. If he concentrated long enough, he thought he could actually glimpse the green-gold energy she’d left behind as he used Jinzen to slip into his inner world, even though he knew that was impossible, that it wasn’t something a Shinigami could see.

Nonetheless, he could tell that it was there, in ways he found more and more disturbing as time went on. A few days ago, Renji had decided to commune with Zabimaru after a long day of chasing the twins around the 1st District and moving a storage room full of heavy boxes up three flights of stairs. His original instructions were incorrect and he had to take them back down one flight of stairs to a different laboratory, which left him on the other side of ‘grumpy’. Upon entering his private, mental sanctum, Renji discovered something unnerving. The place had always looked like an overgrown temple, a thick jungle teeming with all kinds of sounds, scents… the sort of place the nue, the manifestation of his Zanpakuto, would find ‘homey’. Of late though, the strange patch of sand and meadow he’d noticed after his last visit with Nel had grown.

It was slow at first, but eventually the odd groundcover swathed most of the inner courtyard of the temple and when he’d set foot inside, he’d found Zabimaru sunning himself while lounging in the middle of it, scratching his belly fur absently with one paw and yawning. Renji had seen a pile of papayas stacked within easy reach. Meanwhile, he was just in time to see the serpent end of the great beast strike something in the thick, tall grass and swallow it. Renji swore that he spied a long tail and a couple of tiny, mousey feet slide down the snake’s throat. It gave him a heavy-lidded look and lay down in the vegetation to snooze and digest, while the redhead started to worry about whether he had a rodent infestation in his mind to contend with or something else entirely.

Nel’s Claim, for all of its control over his person, shouldn’t have affected his inner world in such an odd manner. A Claim was control, dominance, a violation of a being’s free will, no matter how good it felt. It would continue to be so even if he gave himself up to it willingly for the sake of helping Yoruichi and protecting Kurosaki Karin’s bloody secrets from Aizen. So why did his Zanpakuto seem so ridiculously content of late with what Renji had assumed was an expression of her reiatsu, left behind each time she’d Claimed him? The rest of his inner world was untouched and most of the damage he’d seen since his soul's restoration had been his own fault.

For lack of anything better to do, he’d wandered up to the Baboon King, sat down next to the huge white Nue and tried to determine why his first inclination involved a communal nap in the warm sun with monkey and snake. He had no idea if it was resignation on his Zanpakuto’s part or not, but from the verdant condition of his inner world these days, he gathered that his mixed feelings where Nel was concerned had bled over into a part of his soul that had always been solely his. The Baboon King bitched a lot less these days as well, which made his existence easier on a number of different levels.

In other ways, it terrified him to no end, as it meant those feelings were less mixed than he originally thought.

“Oh, you’re early. Feeling hard up of late?”

Renji closed his eyes and counted to ten as Szayel, followed by Karin and Nemu strode into the chamber. Karin gave him an odd look as well, though she took her customary seat and pulled out a small book from her pocket after latching the door.

He ignored the jab, as he usually did. With bigger things to consider, including how he was going to ask Nel what her involvement was, if any, in the raid without it sounding like some terrible accusation, Renji let the comment slide.

“Knock it off, Szayel. Better early than late.”

“Precisely. He’s on time for once. I’d say it’s a sign of the world coming to an end, but… what was the word… oh, yes, horn dog springs to mind.”

Renji pinched the bridge of his nose as he heard Nemu step closer and start in on the circle with the brush and ink. He didn’t bother opening his eyes.

“There’s no need to be crass!”

Maybe he’d created the patch of grass and sand himself, to cope with the strange, surreal relationship he’d been privy to for the last four years. He repeated the mantra in his head: Nel was only helping him, she didn’t love him, didn’t actually need to be doing this other than to help keep a spy of questionable ability under wraps in the Seireitei. On the other hand, she’d threatened and fought with the Shihoin heir to try to get to him before he had a chance to take his own life in shame. Nel brought him almost everything he needed to slake all of the hungers of which his body seemed capable: food, compassion, insanely good sex. The only thing missing was a bottle of premium sake… and that she wasn’t Kuchiki Rukia.

Maybe it wasn’t uneasiness as much as it was confusion and his confusion, if that was what it was, seemed to be getting worse.

Rukia was who he’d pictured for decades beneath him, moaning his name, begging and pleading for more, in every damned dream he’d had, for as long as he could remember. Dark hair, dark eyes, standing on the front porch of a small house wearing a better, cleaner, finer version of that purple and white yukata she’d been wearing the day he met her, welcoming him home. He still had those dreams, so well-scripted in his head over years and years of repetition he could pull the details from them at will during his waking hours. They’d kept him going during some incredibly dark times, steered him in the right direction, made him work towards his goals no matter the obstacle. He swore he could find his way by them, using them as his personal lodestone.

Now real experience and circumstance layered a different body over those aspirations and these other, competing dreams were darker and much hungrier. They featured sand, blood, and a harsh, fervent need to find relief in the curves and the softness he’d trapped beneath him. Renji swore he could taste Nel as he took her and kept taking her relentlessly under a coal-black sky. When he woke from those dreams, he felt both exhilarated and ashamed. He’d never treat any woman in such a manner, especially now that he’d worked through most of the mental consequences of Yammy’s abuse of both he and his former Taichou. Yet the dreams still came and he still ended up crawling to the shower for an ice-cold dousing afterwards.

He was grateful that Szayel had finally given the twins their own separate rooms in Szayel’s suite, freeing him up to retreat to the privacy of his own space. The kids did NOT need to see the evidence of the beast that freely roamed their guardian’s head in the middle of the night. Either head, actually.

Maybe ‘horn dog’ wasn’t all that far off the mark.

“Renji?”

Someone waved their hand in front of his face and he realized that Karin stood about a foot away, staring up at him with concern in her grey eyes. She held the box containing the Kido cube in one hand

“Are you alright?”

He sighed and scrubbed his face with one hand. She’d been a little more vigilant with regard to his well-being in the last year, no doubt motivated by what he’d tried to do to Szayel and himself, as well as the whipping. His smile was a bit on the wan side, but he nodded. Wordlessly, she handed him the cube and made her way out of the nearly-completed circle.

“Don’t bother. He’ll be fine. Let’s get the mobile bordello online, shall we?” Szayel snarked, eyeing the barrier readings on the console.

“Kami, Szayel, do you ever quit?” Karin shot back irritably.

“Now, why would I do that, Karin-sama?”

Renji paid them little mind, the novelty of their bickering having worn off a couple of years ago. Maybe he’d never figure out what connected those two, other than being Claimed by the Sixth Espada. He placed the cube in its accustomed spot, aligned it and resumed standing against the headboard, chewing on a thumbnail and frowning.

Now, if he could just remain oriented while within the barrier. Nel seemed to walk out of a different wall each time they met. Was the cube designed to tinker only with one individual’s sense of direction, while the person entering via the portal remained knowledgeable of the exit’s location? Did it take note of the person inside and open the portal in a spot in the opposing direction?

He hung on to the bedstead as the Kido wall crackled through him, leaving his ears buzzing and his hair standing on end. He swore he could see sparks behind his closed eyelids. Shaking himself, he came face to face with the iridescent interior wall, watched as Szayel and Karin’s figures blurred and the back-and-forth between them faded to a different kind of buzzing. Renji swallowed a few times to adjust to the change in air pressure. Karin had given him that advice, saying that it had worked for her while traveling by plane as a child. He’d wanted her to elaborate on what the heck that had meant, but he supposed it didn’t matter, as long as it worked.

He expected her to show up behind him, as she had before, but this time he seemed to have picked the right spot to stand. A thin line of black appeared on the far wall, growing larger until he could see a three-foot-by-six-foot opening. The Dangai lay just beyond and he felt himself drawn towards it, coming around the front of the bed to step closer.

When she entered, hair flying, head down, arms extended and almost at a dead run, he had one second to brace himself before she barreled into him. Stepping to the side, he caught her before she could hurt herself and brought her around. With a hissing sound, the door closed while he stared down at the figure panting in his arms.

Renji had done his fair share of dashing through the Dangai before, on those rare occasions when the old 12th Division would ‘forget’ to stabilize the passages between Senkaimon. He had no doubt that no matter how good this Hachi was, he probably wasn’t capable of delaying something like the Cleaner for long. That was yet another reason for the time limit, he decided.

“Nel-chan… are you all right?”

He got no farther than that before she reached up on tip-toe and caught his lips with hers, twining her arms around his neck and pulling him down with surprising strength.

He’d never been tossed by a female before, outside of a real combat situation. Had his reflexes been any less honed, he would have bounced off of the mattress and landed in a heap on the other side of the bed. Instead, he caught a fistful of blanket and coverlet (a recent addition to the bed despite Szayel bitching about the expense) and braced his foot on the floor. She caught him as he scrambled back onto the bed, trying to figure out what the hell had just happened, and her mouth found his again, pressing up against him as if he were some piece of laundry that needed de-wrinkling and her body the iron.

It was like nothing he’d ever felt before, devouring and demanding. Her tongue sought a second entrance to his mouth and when he parted his lips in a gasp for air, she pounced, sealing off his airway and jarring his senses in one fell swoop. His hands began roving over her back, cupping her bottom through the woolen skirt and gathering up the garment so that he could slide his palms over her flesh. Renji’s hands finally found the skirt's zipper and the buckle of her sword belt. He pulled down the one and undid the other as quickly as possible, pushing the whole bundle over her hips and rising up a little so that he could get them out of the way of what was shaping up to be a frenzy. Nel pulled her legs out of the tangle and straddled his thighs.

Meanwhile, her hands tore at his obi and if he didn’t want to have to purchase another, he’d better make it easier for her to get what she desired. Renji hurriedly tugged on the knot, letting the binding fall loose along with the folds of his hakama, before both of her hands slid below his navel to try to grab him. Calloused, dexterous fingers manipulated him until his breath came in needy pants. Just before he tried to seize her shoulders, to pull her back and ask what was going on, Nel moved forward and up, breaking her kiss, to hold the tip of his awakened cock against her entrance.

“Nel, what in…” he struggled to say, only to find her mouth on his again as she took him in.

He couldn’t even say she was properly prepared, as his shaft’s progress was painfully slow. His hands moved to her hips and in an effort to shorten things, he bucked up a little bit at a time, until she was properly seated and her warmth surrounded him.

“Wait, Nel, you’re not…”

She still hadn’t even said ‘hello’. Though he wasn’t particularly adverse to this kind of substitute for a proper greeting, this simply wasn’t like her. But when he tilted her head up to look into her eyes, to find out what had brought this on, even to give her body a short amount of time to adjust to his, what he saw looking back at him was enough to steal the breath from his lungs. Something hard dug into his ribs and he realized that Zabimaru still hung from his slack obi, but when he went to ease the Zanpakuto from his side, Nel caught his wrist, pulled it away and moved it to rest against the sheet next to his head.

“Renji-kun…”

Her voice was low, throaty, almost raw, but it proved she wasn’t so far gone that she’d forgotten about asking. The sheer amount of mingled lust and desperation in it shook him a little, because he could feel something similar rising in him, wanting to be let out, banging against the bars of its cage. The redhead detected her reiatsu licking along his limbs, his belly and her current Claim literally slithered across his skin, in a way that felt like being wrapped in the very best silk. Trying not to react to it would have been a waste of time and willpower. With his one free hand, he reached up and his thumb traced a small circle on her cheek.

“Okay.”

It was like the time he’d first tasted her and gotten a glimpse of the creature beneath the veneer of sweet civility for his efforts. Once that word was out of his mouth, she proceeded to overcome him with both her body and her power. It was almost sore for him as she moved her hips; she wasn’t prepared, and had simply taken him into her. Thankfully, after a minute or so, her passage began to slick itself and the initially rough friction became a smooth, tight, rapid glide.

Nel made a noise in her throat as her reiatsu filled him, gushing into his open mouth while his tongue fought with hers. His free hand landed on her lower back, and then slid around to root beneath the tunic she still wore. Renji cupped one full breast, unencumbered by any sort of support and latched onto it, fingers teasing her nipple until it hardened. He could do nothing about the way her hips sped up, how her snug heat wreaked as much havoc on him as her reiatsu did as it surged through him. The fact that the inflow of it seemed violent threw him a little, but the less rational part of his brain made him bend his knees and pump upwards to meet her, tearing muffled cries from each of them.

'Violent' was a good way to describe his climax. It felt like a wave breaking over him and he tore free of her hand long enough to clench her hips with all ten fingers and stab into her in a furious motion. Her power clawed at him, stripping away a portion of his reiatsu even as he filled her with hot surges of cum. Just after he sensed her leaving an equal amount of her energy around him, strengthening what was already there, her body followed his and she began clenching around him furiously as she came.

Renji gave himself up to it, opening his mouth wider and running his hands through her hair. He gulped down what he could of the waning stream of reiatsu, guzzling it greedily in a way that surprised and frightened him. When her mouth finally tore itself from his, Nel took deep lungfuls of air, her channel still rippling and milking Renji for all he was worth.

It had never been like that before between them and Kami help him, he found he liked it. Those ravenous dreams of late, where he’d woken up with sheets stained from multiple wet dreams, as if he was some horny teenager, bubbled back up to haunt him. Before he knew it, he’d sat up and roughly switched their positions, pushing her down into the mattress, her head against the footboard.

What the hell has gotten into me… he blearily wondered as he knelt between her spread thighs, watching her swollen nether lips twitch and trickles of white escape her still-trembling sex. For a second, the institutional-grade cotton of the sheets turned to gritty sand and the insane urge to hold her down with as much strength as he could muster, to keep her from escaping seized him.

His unruly and ten-months-deprived body apparently hadn’t had enough. Nel looked up at him through long dark lashes and the odd, animalistic gleam in them ignited another surge of need at the base of his spine. He let his hakama fall, the now-stained black fabric slipping down his thighs to his knees. Then, while the woman below him continued to try to catch her breath, he shoved her legs apart, slid his hands beneath her bottom, pried apart her slippery outer folds with his thumbs and let his mouth descend on her.

Sweet from her, bitter from him, salt from both of them and musk from their recent joining. She cried out as his tongue followed the passage his cock had recently filled, reveling in the fact that he was the one that had done this to her, he was the one that had made her lie boneless against the sheets. Renji wasn’t entirely sure if it was only him, or if the bestial parts of his soul were adding to his enjoyment of this, but as she writhed and tried to get his tongue deeper into her, he knew she wasn’t quite done either, Claim or no Claim.

Renji gave one last long lick to her core and while she whimpered, pulled her into his lap, facing away from him so that his hands could reach around and easily grab both breasts. Her head fell back against his shoulders as he fondled them, and then moved them down over the taut muscles of her stomach, holding her against him so that she could feel his renewed arousal against her ass. With her knees spread wide over his thighs, one of Renji’s hands went back to teasing a nipple, while he slid the fingers of the other into her dripping heat.

“I’m glad to see you too, Nel-chan,” he murmured into one ear, after brushing a long length of turquoise-hued hair out of the way and running his tongue around the shell of her ear.

“Renji-kun, please… please…”

She was almost in tears, her voice halting and he frowned, drawing back the fingers currently slipping in and out of her, until her hand grasped his wrist again, preventing him from removing them altogether. Instead, she guided them back into her and whimpered again.

“I need… just because, Renji-kun. Can you…?”

The warning his better judgment screamed at him, telling him to stop and figure out why she’d fucking jumped him the second she’d seen him crumbled in the face of that whispered plea.

Could he? Hell, yes…

In hindsight, Renji figured this was where he committed his first mistake.

He pushed her down, forcing her onto all fours and yanked her hips up with one hand while pressing her upper half into the bed. He expected a struggle of some sort, since she seemed to prefer him beneath her, but instead she simply let him position her as he wanted. Her lips were parted, her hands fisted in the blanket, hair fanned out to the side like rippling water. If that sight wasn’t the perfect aphrodisiac, Renji didn’t know what was. He let his rejuvenated erection rest for a second in the crack of her ass until he was sure the angle was right. Licking his lips he had the taste of her on his tongue and it only seemed to make his arousal that much more intense.

Gripping his cock, he directed the weeping head to her swollen sex and nudged the tip through her folds until he found her flushed entrance. One twitch forward and he was in her again, fingers digging deeply into the flesh of her hips, as much as her Hierro would allow.

What followed, Renji decided was a half-clothed, heated rut, fueled by the sight of his cock thrusting in and out of her as she lay below. She hadn’t done anything to pull his hair tie this time, or mess with his headband, so his view was completely unimpeded. When she would squirm, his hands would hold her firmly in place, keeping her from moving far. When she would try to push back against him, he’d speed up, making the legs on either side of his thighs shake. Then he ground his shaft so deep into her he thought he could feel the back of her throat.

You’re not getting away…

He kept pounding into her, each slap of his hips against her bottom in time with one of her shaky breaths. She lifted her hips higher and Renji nearly bit through his lip at how the maneuver made her even tighter around him, her flesh rubbing at the sensitive area at the base of his cock, where he could feel his second release swiftly building.

Closing his eyes, he let the pads of his fingers slide around the spot where their bodies met, drenching them with her juices and reaching just a little bit lower, to toy with the cener of her pleasure, flicking it in time with each plunge into her core. Nel sobbed as he did this, the sound dragging him towards another climax he had little chance of forestalling. She was too tight, too wet, too heated and his fingers sped up in an effort to try to satisfy her before he lost what little control he had left and just fucked her into the mattress. In his mind’s eye, unbidden, they lay in the shifting sand where he’d captured her and the only thing that mattered in the world was keeping this beautiful creature beneath him, filling her time and time again, hearing her cry his name again and again and again...

He threw his head back, snarling, shoving his hips forward as hard as he could as he came again. His swirling fingers pressed together by accident, trapping her clit between them and the pressure served to send her over the edge as well.

The scream that erupted from Nel’s throat formed a name…

Renji’s eyes flew open, hands tightening briefly on her flanks, having a hard time reconciling what he thought he’d just heard with the wet pulsing and throbbing going on all around his twitching cock.

…a name that hung in the air between them as the force of their respective climaxes slowly left them…

…a name that wasn’t his.

Renji went deathly still and slipped from her, until his back hit the headboard, a mixture of disbelief and shock on his face. His body tried to recover from what he’d just put it though and his sex-fogged brain tried to deny what he’d just heard. Nel, meanwhile, pulled her legs up beneath her, not meeting his eyes.

“What the hell? Ichigo? ICHIGO?!” he asked in disbelief.

He could only stare at her as the last of the pleasure drained away and something cold and clenching took its place, a growing numbness in his gut that grew larger as the seconds ticked by. They sat like that on the bed, Renji staring at the woman who had just begged him, pleaded with him to take her and…

Suddenly he scrambled, or tried to scramble from the tangle of covers, clothes and weapons, reaching for his hakama and obi with shaking fingers.

“Renji…’ he heard her whisper and this time all he could feel was more of that icy sickness spreading through him, Abruptly, he turned back towards her, her face hidden as she bowed her head and something in him… fractured.

His second mistake, he decided in retrospect, had been to open his mouth.

“Ichigo? Seriously? You come at me like a fucking bat out of hell, Claim me without saying a word to me and when I do give you what you want, you call out for fucking KUROSAKI?!!”

More than his hands were shaking now; his entire frame trembled and he wasn’t sure if it was from anger or outrage or… or…

He stepped back into his lower garments, making a hash of retying them and then snatched up his obi and Zabimaru. The stab to his pride was bad enough. He heard her move and the rustle of the bedding made him look up to see her pulling on the skirt and fumbling with the zipper, then snatching up her belt and weapon. She still hadn’t looked him in the eye.

Renji took a long, slow, deep breath of air, pushed his headband back and tried not to think of just how much, just how deeply that one word had bloody hurt. Then another idea struck him and he felt his mouth run dry.

Was it Ichigo she saw every time they did this, to get her through the experience? Was she in fucking love with that orange-haired…?

“Why? Every time I come here, I have to feel how much you wish I was Rukia-chan, how much you hate it that I’m not her, no matter how I try to please you, to do what's right by you...”

Nel stood before him, barefoot and clutching Gamuza and her belt to her chest, head drooping so that the dark eyeholes of her ram's skull mask confronted him. Whatever he might have said dried up as she uttered this, the potential retort turning to rough stones on his tongue.

What? She felt what from me?

Then she did look up and Renji's grip on the headboard tightened when he saw saltwater pooling in her eyes, a mixture of anger, sorrow and a horribly familiar form of despair tagging along. It almost bordered on hopelessness. The liquid ran freely down her cheeks, darkening the green of the winter tunic she wore as they landed on her breasts.

“What is it about her that makes everyone want her so much? I’ve tried being strong and I’ve tried everything to get him to notice me. I even endured Hachi’s healing so I’d have a form he would want, so I could be useful instead of a burden. He never looks at me the way he looks at her, even though the Hollow within him is powerful!”

She was really crying now, her voice thick with tears and Renji could do nothing but stand there, facing the onslaught without a boat, let alone a paddle.

“He has a mask…I thought…I thought that unlike Hachi and Hiyori, he might be able to return a Claim… he’s so strong… but he doesn’t want me. Because he wants her and she said yes when he asked her. Ichigo said he was tired of waiting.”

The world seemed to drop out from under Renji’s feet.

“Waiting? Waiting for what?” he croaked out.

Nel scrubbed at her reddened eyes, snuffed as she backed up to the far wall, the one through which she’d entered. She turned and placed her palm against the wall and the passage to the Dangai appeared. Her answer had layers of misery in it.

“He said he didn’t want to wait any more to marry her, war or no war. They went out to see the Christmas lights and he asked her. She said yes. I… I can’t be her, no matter what either of you want and now…”

The woman before him seemed to realize what she’d just said and what it had just done to him. His face went ashen with shock as he finally processed what he'd heard.

Rukia and Ichigo…

Married.

He was suddenly reminded of Kurotsuchi, crushing the doll Szayel made of Ishida with his Resurrecion into tiny pieces. Was this what someone breaking the tiny replica the Espada had created of him would feel like, if it and every internal organ in it were ground to a fine powder in someone else's hands? It wasn’t as awful as the moment he learned of what Yammy had done with him, but it was bloody close. Had he not been hanging on to the headboard, his knees would have given out.

Renji’s third, and final mistake he later concluded, was that he stayed still; not trusting his legs to move properly, he didn’t try to go after her. He remained frozen next to the rumpled bed, Zabimaru falling from his nerveless fingers to the mattress as Nel burst into fresh sobs and fled the chamber while all of the color drained from his world.

To be continued...
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Consolation Prize (of Victory)