Waiting Game
Their's was a tale of unrequited love not fit for bedtime stories.
She always had wondered what they would be like as a couple. Golden against silver, voluptuous against bony, honest against liar; they would contrast each other in every way. She would be far more affection to him than he to her in public, but in private he would do things to catch her off guard like brush her hair out of her eyes or kiss her when she was in the middle of speaking. They'd totally have super hawt sex on her desk when she didn't want to do paperwork and each time they would be so close to getting caught by straight laced Hitsugaya but then he would escape using that strange Gin talent that lets him leave without a trace and she'd be left in her office to face her captain's wrath with swollen lips and wayward hair. It would be messy and people would disapprove but it would be him and that was enough for her.
When he dies she stops wondering.
(After he was struck down she didn't move from that spot. When they found her they had to pry her hands from his body, hands hardened with his blood and her tears and the knowledge she would never feel that weight of him again.)
While he didn't physically leave anything to hold her from moving on, she still has a lifetime of memories that will always linger. He made it easier for her to heal but that doesn't make it easy; he lessened the impossible to the improbable. Certain spots are now automatically off limits. Some are easy enough to avoid but others, like her room, are not. The few hours she spends in her bed are haunted with the shadow of his silhouette beside her, the ghost of his touch whispering all over her skin. She spends the nights tossing and turning, an unbearable ache spreading slowly through her body that never really leaves. She wonders if she'll ever be able to look at a persimmon without flinching.
Yet time has a funny way of pushing forward and before she realizes, it's spring. Many throw themselves into their training (her captain included), so much so that she hardly sees him for long stretches of time, save for when he gives the few remedial orders he feels obligated to, like do your paperwork or at least pretend to hide those bottles instead of leaving them right on your desk. Yet even when he's reprimanding her he won't look her in the eye. And she knows why, she knows all too well why none of her friends are able to truly face her.
(Her not so subtle reaction to Gin's death only proved what those close to her had already suspected, though none of them had the guts to ask the extent of her relationship with the captain many deemed strange and off-putting.)
She wasn't ashamed to grieve him (no, never, he saved her damn life) but she understood there was a side of Gin only she was privy to.
The full weight of it hits her in the summer. It was a date that really shouldn't have meant much, but when she realized it was exactly two months from his birthday she can't help but feel like someone knocked the breath out of her.
"Gin is gone," She says it out loud, because up until that moment some small stupid part of her was hoping he'd pop inside her office without warning and ask her to accompany him on a walk. "Gin is dead and he's not coming back."
The rest of the Gotei 13 may have ridded themselves of a traitor, but she lost a childhood idol, a far too occasional lover, and a dear friend. And she finally starts to accept it.
Time moves on. Eventually she does too.