Visiting hours
Hitsugaya visits Hinamori in confinement.
Hinamori has a very nice shampoo. It smells like sunshine and rain, it smells of cherry flavoured bubblegum and jasmine, it smells of jellybeans and warm days. Hitsugaya likes it, sometimes he tries to sit a little closer, move just an inch nearer to smell it, through the years, through the shinigami academy and Aizen and every thing that has happened, it has never changed. The scent lingers, he likes that. It reminds him of old times
It's rather strange how that scent never fades despite the coldness of the room. The room is cold and bare. There is only one bed in the middle and a small table at the side, Hinamori doesn't look up to greet him, she is playing with her fingers, wringing them. Her hair is down. There are red gashes on her wrist, Hitsugaya knows that those are not training wounds, they are too perfect, they lack the ragged edges of training wounds. He never pictured her room to be like this, to be so bare. Her room back in Rukongai was filled with junk, beads and trinklets, fished out from the garbage but here, the walls are white, the sheets are white, everything is white, just like his hair. He wonders if this reminds her of him.
Hinamori herself reminds him of many things. She reminds him of watermelons and how sweet they taste, she reminds him of happy days on his grandmother's porch. She lets him remember that he is still a child, even if he wears the white haori, even if he has a sword slung on his back, even if he has killed, he is still a child. A little boy who still loves watermelons and jellybeans, who likes to feel the sun on his toes, who likes taking afternoon naps and calls her bedwetter Momo. She reminds him of the past and how happy he was.
He hasn't seen his grandmother for a long time. The last time he saw her, Hinamori brought oranges and they sat by the faded grey of her tombstone in silence. Hinamori thinks she will be reborn into the human world happy and peaceful, she gave him a hug then. He misses her hugs but he didn't tell her that, however, for once he didn't struggle, he let himself be loved.
She doesn't love him of course, he's just her little brother and it's just fine by him.
Naturally, she is weak. Hinamori's form is terrible, her left foot is not taut enough, her hands are not stable enough to wield her sword and she's too soft hearted to kill anyone, she is no Rukia, who despite her apple-pie sweetness and seeming innocence, can kill and will kill. Hinamori merely aims to wound or knock her opponent unconscious. She tells him that when she sees people, she sees their life, their stories, that she can tell how they lived and because of that she cannot kill. He remembers telling her that if she didn't kill, she would be killed and she left it at that, smiling her wane little smile, muttering that he was being too old for his age.
Even so, she is still weak. She is not a fighter, even with kido, even with Tobiume, Hitsugaya knows that she cannot hold her own in a fight. She should have been an assassin, one who slips in and kills in the middle of the darkness, as shadows shroud the face of the body, not the person she kills but simply a nameless, faceless body which she slipped her sword into. There is no attachment when there is no face. That was why he thought she should have joined Onmitsukido with Division two, she would have done well there, Soi fung would have appreciated her loyalty and hard work, her peers would have liked her and she would have come home once in a while to sit on their porch and eat watermelons.
She wouldn't have met Aizen. She should never have met him. That way she wouldn't spend all night doing paperwork, waiting for her Taichou to go home or boiling him tea so that he wouldn't get too sleepy and overworked. She would have gone back to see him at least once and not give up her leave just to do more paperwork, just to train more to make Aizen Taichou happy. Then she wouldn't have worked for him and trusted him and called him her Taichou with her large guileless eyes. Her eyes had once been so warm and light, like hot cocoa on a cold day, now they are dark and sad or listless and tired. She's not his Hinamori anymore, she has left with Aizen.
He realizes she was never his in the first place.
She still smells of sunshine and rain, just that this time she doesn't smile. She doesn't cry. She just looks at him as if she doesn't remember.
Too much of the past, she hangs on to too much of the past. Even with the traitor Aizen gone, she mourns for him. It's not his fault, she tells Hitsugaya, when he comes to visit, gesturing for him to sit beside her. Aizen taichou must have been forced into this by Ichimaru taichou, she has a knowing look in her eye, Aizen taichou is too much of a good man to do these bad things, he was forced, yes, he must have had something, someone important held at ransom to make him have done all this. Hitsugaya doesn't say anything, he just smiles and nods as she tells him of how Aizen taichou patted her head and how he told her that he liked her shampoo.
"Shiro chan."
Hinamori used to like calling him that, it's a nickname from their childhood, she tells him it's because he reminds him of winter and that's a good thing because she likes the frost and the soft touch of snow. It's wet, she says with a simple smile.
After Aizen left, she stops calling him that all together, Hitsugaya Taichou, she addresses him with her flat flat eyes, even as she tells him about Aizen. She pleads for him to bring her Taichou, her Aizen back safe and sound, away from the clutches of the evil Ichimaru Taichou. She pleads with Hitsugaya Taichou. She stops asking for favours from Shiro chan.
Hitsugaya honestly understands why Hinamori hates him. While she hates Ichimaru Taichou from taking her Aizen away from her, she hates Hitsugaya for not having stopped Ichimaru. She knows he could have done it, he knows he could have done it too, Hyourinmaru had been calling for blood that night, all he needed to do was to have gone to bankai, to have unleashed his frozen flowers and Ichimaru would have been buried under frost and ice, forever frozen in time. The thing was, that despite all of Ichimaru's treachery and all his strange quirks, Hitsugaya kind of respected the guy, after all he did have the guts to get the girl of his dreams and while he was still a treacherous traitorous bastard, he was still a pretty much okay person and honestly Hitsugaya would have preferred to see Aizen leave.
Selfish? Yes. Did he regret it? Yes.
However if Hinamori had been completely taken out of the picture, he would not have even cared, he would just have done his paperwork have it filed, gone home and forget about it.
However now, he cares. Damnnit, he cares. He can see how Hinamori has withered, how she is dying without her Aizen, he may hate Aizen for all of his smarmy, slick, unnatural charm however if Hinamori needs him, who is he to say anything? He should have made Aizen stay, he should have seen the signs. He knows that Hinamori blames herself for that too, he knows that she thinks she could have made him stay, that she should have seen the signs. He knows that she deals with this through the red sneers that snake across her wrist and recounting happy stories.
He would have hugged her then, he would have told her everything was going to be alright. But it isn't and he would never lie to her, even if she is on the verge of collapse he would tell her the cold, naked truth and that was because she made him promise to never lie. The problem just lies with whether she believes him or not. So now, as he watches the girl who hates him, who sees him as a liar and a traitor, someone who has betrayed her and watched cold and indifferent as she had her heart ripped out and run over, he realises why he has never told her.
He never tells her because she smells of clean clothes and warm days. He never tells her because she is spring sunshine and daffodils. He will never tell her because frost can never touch spring, it's cruel touch would kill the spirit and the life of the delicate flowers and plants, it would have strangled the season, tainting the spring air with ice. She needs someone soft, pliable, someone gentle, someone understanding but Hitsugaya is frost, he is cold, indifferent, distant. She needs warmth, summer air, love and happy smiles, he is winter's breath, ice and frost. He needs her, she, not him.
For she will wither and die like chrysanthemums, like daffodils in the cold and he can never do that to her.