Disclaimer: I do not own Bleach.

Title: Growing Up

Characters: Matsumoto, Hitsugaya

Summary: Matsumoto doesn't understand how her taichou has grown up without her noticing.

A/N: I'm being immensely inspired by peroxidepest17's Bleach Drabbles, which I'm reading over for the second time, so I thought I should try some drabbles of my own. Let's see how long I can keep this up. And this one is quite…angsty. Strange. And it has some (almost nonexistent) hints of HitsugayaxMatsumoto, which I might elaborate on later. With another drabble. –shrug- And arg, ff.n's spacing gets on my nerves...

Finished: 5/25/07

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Growing Up

Her taichou had really grown up, Matsumoto thought. Hitsugaya Toushirou had changed into a charming young man, a man with effortless good looks, a fanclub, and an endless list of perfect qualities. He'd changed from being cute to being handsome, from being a kid burdened with an adult mind to being a true adult, with a body to match the mind. She'd never noticed it before now, not really. He'd always been lil' Shirou-kun, who'd always be short and cute because shinigami always aged slower and lived longer. She had thought like that for a long long time.

But then, just today, Matsumoto had noticed something as Hitsugaya-taichou had come through the door to their shared office. She had stood up to greet him, of course (though invariably her definition of greeting was different from his), and had stopped in the middle of her morning welcome to stare at her captain. Because Hitsugaya-taichou was now taller than her. It wasn't by much, less than a centimeter or so, but Matsumoto now had to tilt her chin a little bit up to look into her taichou's eyes, and that startled her. Where had the little kid gone? Her little taichou was now a man…

Was this why she was drinking enough to have a massive hangover tomorrow?

It wasn't a good enough reason, she thought. She had always expected this – her taichou couldn't stay a kid forever, could he? He had to grow up sometime. Yes, she had always expected it, but had never realized that it had already happened. Sweet (well, he could be when he wanted to be) little Hitsugaya-kun had turned into one of the most respected captains in the Gotei 13 a long time ago…

Matsumoto hiccupped and set her sake back down on the counter, remembering the first time she had seen her taichou. He had been scared out of his wits, probably both by his new position and by his new vice-captain. Matsumoto had squealed over him the whole time, about how cute he was, and how smart he had to have been to make it to captain position straight out of the academy. Truth be told, she would've loved any captain at all, because her old captain had retired quite a while back, and she had been overtaxed with work since then.

Filling both the captain and vice-captain's positions had been hard, and she had been overjoyed to be given someone to share the responsibility with, even if he was only a snot-nosed kid genius who still needed a few more hours of sleep per night than she did, who had never done paperwork before, even if he had all of the brains and strength but none of the practical experience that one needed as a captain. It would come, Matsumoto was sure, and she was willing to help him until then.

He had moved into her quarters a few weeks later. Or really, they had simply torn down the walls between the captain's and vice-captain's quarters, because there was no use for them. Hitsugaya still needed help doing laundry and cooking his own meals, if only because nobody had actually taught him how to do those kinds of chores (Matsumoto had shuddered in sympathy when he had told her of living off the Academy's cafeteria's food for the last decade or so), and Matsumoto thought it was fair to cook and clean for her captain when he had relieved her of half her paperwork (how to do said paperwork was the first thing she had taught him, along with decipherable penmanship). And besides, now they both had more space to share.

The new arrangement had been a little awkward at first, but they had both gotten used to it after a time. Both Matsumoto and Hitsugaya had agreed on the need for it – it would have been embarrassing for the both of them had the 10th division captain come to work with stains on his captain's coat, even if it was excusable that he didn't know about the magic power of bleach.

And so for an uncountable number of years, they had lived in the same quarters, as they were still doing, so how had Matsumoto missed such a drastic change in her taichou?

He wasn't young anymore. He wasn't short anymore. He didn't need her to pick up his dirty socks anymore, or to carry him to bed when he had unexpectedly fallen asleep on the couch while finishing up a stack of paperwork.

And that was it, wasn't it?

Hitsugaya-taichou didn't need her to mother him anymore.

Matsumoto picked up her sake cup once again, sipping the alcohol as she gave in to her depression.

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.:I need to get used to the new you:.