A/N: M Warning. Chapters containing Mature material will be marked at the beginning. Rating will go up in later chapters.

~ This is assuming Gin has been killed by Aizen, which I stoutly hope is not the case. ~

The sounds echoing through the vacant halls of Las Noches were few, mostly of the back-up squads to Twelfth Division finding ways to amuse themselves or at least pass the time in the hulking complex Sousuke Aizen and his forces had occupied a year earlier.

Twelfth Division was on business – Kurotsuchi's business – and their captain took the matter seriously. So did everyone else; they didn't dare not. But with Captain Kurotsuchi's division intent on exploring every nook and cranny in search of any hidden Szayel Apporo research, none of them were taking the matters of other security into mind.

Rangiku Matsumoto sighed as she wandered the hall outside the center-most maze of corridors, hating that Divisions Ten and Nine had escorted Twelfth for the venture. She hated the sweltering heat of Hueco Mundo's day and the chill stillness of its night. She hated that there was no environmental controls functioning, making the outside temperatures creep into the gray-walled complex, and that she knew Kurotsuchi would take his painstaking time in his research.

It meant she and the other shinigami troops had nothing to do but loiter.

And most of all she hated that it was the very place Gin Ichimaru had spent so much time before his death. She resented it, the tall walls and Aizen and his minions and the limbo that her heart had been in for those months before she'd known whether he was indeed traitor, or indeed the man she thought she knew.

A few moments with him before he'd slipped into a new afterlife without her – that was all she'd gotten of him, all she had of him, the few fragments that she kept sweeping together to make into a bittersweet memory of knowing he was still hers, at the end.

She glanced to where Izuru Kira and Shuuhei Hisagi were approaching from another section of hallways. She pushed a bit of a smile onto her face, a forced movement over the last year.

"How much longer?" she asked when they caught up to her.

Izuru looked especially miserable. "Too long. We're back, if you want to go on your break."

Shuuhei nodded. "We've cleared the west sectors. Nothing there."

"There's nothing anywhere," she said, breathing a sigh in the void stillness of the halls. She put one hand to Haineko's hilt. "I can't wait for this to be over."

Both men nodded, Shuuhei throwing her as much of a sympathetic look as she'd let him. "Take a break. It isn't easy being here."

Rangiku wanted to laugh, but only managed more of a smile. "I don't see why Captain Kurotsuchi needs so much back-up. Nothing has happened in three days."

Shuuhei glanced down a dimly lit hall. "This waiting on nothing is killing me."

"Okay, I'll take a breather," she decided, letting another avenue of thought make the decision. She put a hand to her chest where the inoculants patch was barely hidden beneath an edge of her uniform top. "This thing is starting to itch. I don't think we need them anyway."

Shuuhei tried not to notice her fingers edging the white of her under robe. "They're about at their limits. Captain Kurotsuchi should call us all in soon."

"Maybe you could call a captains' meeting," she suggested, raising an eyebrow. "Or you," she added to Izuru. "You're both acting captains now."

There was no humor in Izuru's face. "I don't think that's going to be enough to convince Captain Kurotsuchi."

Shuuhei nodded, grinning a little. "Doubt it."

Rangiku turned. "I'll catch up with you soon."

"You want company?" Shuuhei called as she moved away. "I mean, no one's seen anything, but that doesn't mean there's nothing here."

She tossed him a smile over her shoulder. "Whatever Szayel Aporro did to kill off anything above a lowest class Arrancar worked. There's nothing, not even a drop of reiatsu left in this place."

He nodded, reading more than she allowed showing in her quick smile. "Watch your back, Rangiku."

She left them and headed deeper into the complex. She'd wanted to do it earlier, follow some faint trail that she alone could detect, something that called to her bones as only Gin could. It wasn't there, and she blamed the inoculants patch adhered to her chest.

On impulse she thought back to her captain's explanation.

"It's just a safeguard against any residual reiatsu-leaching walls Aporro may have set up," Captain Hitsugaya had told her when he'd given her the small, pale blue patch to put under her uniform in Tenth Division's headquarters three days ago. "It'll block anything from absorbing your spiritual pressure; no one wants their reiryoku monitored and blueprinted. Aporro has been known to do it."

Of course, Rangiku had proceeded to put the patch on in the office, and her captain had promptly blushed and yelled at her to "Wait! Not here!"

She smiled now at the thought. There was nothing like a brief flash of skin to change his dour mood into terror.

Her smile dimmed as she turned the next set of corridors where the halls began a slow descent to a lower level. She knew the dangers of treading anywhere Szayel Aporro had played. She knew what he'd done to Renji Abarai in mapping his reiatsu strengths.

Fatigue from the last three days caught up with her as she cautiously turned another corner of hall junctures. It was day three of a three-day stay at the vast complex while Twelfth conducted research. Short trips of a few days were what General Yamamoto wanted, and that's what the inoculants patches were designed for, but it made for tiring non-work. Sleeping on the floor or propped against a wall – even with Shuuhei offering a cozy shoulder when she drooped over to him – was getting old and she wanted her soft bed and an enormous meal. And a long bath.

Everything looked the same down the next corridor, as Rangiku expected. She sighed and slowed her steps, knowing the futilely of her venture into Las Noches' interior. One drawback of the patch under her robe was that it also dulled some of her own powers of perception. Twice Captain Hitsugaya had startled her while she made her rounds, and once had been when she was with the third seat from her own division, surprising both of them. A side-effect, he'd told her. An accepted trade-off.

She'd come to hate the term trade-off. A few in Soul Society had told her that was what Gin had done. Sacrificed himself. Taken a hero's course of action.

It hadn't helped her feel any better, even when the collective captains – hardly the Gotei 13 without thirteen captains – had given him a Soul Reaper's final ceremony.

Gin was still dead.

The white robes and burnt candles didn't change that for her.

"Damn you, Aizen," she murmured, pausing in the hall, hand clenched around her sword handle.

She didn't close her eyes as she wanted to, didn't try to imagine Gin standing before her, giving her that crooked smile and easy chuckle from her decades of memories with him. Instead she pushed one side of her robe a few inches to expose the small blue patch on her breast. She slowly peeled it off, chiding herself as she did.

If there was anything left of Gin Ichimaru, even a trace of his reiatsu, she wanted to feel it on her skin, and she couldn't do it with that blocker limiting her senses. She bit her lower lip as the patch came off, realizing she was holding her breath.

She waited, every nerve in her body waiting, reaching for any tendril of reiatsu ribbon that wanted to call out to her. Her fingers softened on the sword hilt, barely touching as she strained to feel something.

Anything.

All she felt was the thin particles that were always present at Hueco Mundo. No lingering trace of Shinso, no hint that Gin had ever been there.

Rangiku licked her lips, hoping, tasting nothing but three days worth of weary and a year of sorrow. She let herself lean against the wall behind her, the semi-lit hall seeming the perfect place to sense anything of Gin, as if he'd have left a grin smirking in the darkened corners.

Her eyes dropped down to the blue patch in her fingers. It was about spent, and she knew she should put it back on and weave her way through the halls to the rest of the divisions readying to leave for Soul Society.

Maybe there was something left of him, maybe she was just too tired to feel it. She looked up quickly as a heavier feeling ebbed through the hall.

It was nothing she recognized. She quickly stood straighter, pulling herself out of her pity, and then she heard a low hum of a generator from the way she'd come.

She sighed. So Captain Kurotsuchi has found another toy to investigate. He'd be delighted. It would also mean another trip back to Hell for the unlucky squads for back-up.

She carefully placed the patch back on her skin, smoothing it on her right breast, sighing at her frivolous and fruitless pursuit of a memory.

Her steps were slower as she turned back down the hall to find the rest of the divisions that were also ready to leave. She began the network of halls back to where she knew Shuuhei and Izuru would be.

From a secondary hall the last Espada watched her go, remaining hidden in the darker, unlit depths of the corridor, content to watch the misplaced shinigami.

Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez knew who she was. He knew who they all were, but he found her more interesting to watch. She'd been oblivious to him, which was just fine with him.

He knew who she was. She was the one who'd killed Nakeem Grindina.

Damn Aizen.

Grimmjow couldn't agree more.

A/N: Thank you for reading!