Her fingers slid through his hair, slightly dampened with sweat. She admired the silkiness of his hair, the way it was always tidy, even then.

"You should grow your hair out," she told him while she attempted to untangle the sheets.

"Hmm. You think so?" He asked her lazily. Before she could reply, his lungs contracted painfully in a coughing fit; he muffled it and as soon as it was over, they pretended it never happened.

"Yeah. Then I'd call you Shirou-chan." She grinned at him, traced a circle over his chest with her index finger.

"It does have a ring to it," he said seriously.

He would let her call him anything she wanted to.

----- - -----

He hasn't seen her face in centuries. Only a few people left in the Gotei 13 remembered that she ever existed in the first place. There had been a bitter irony in his outliving her, though it no longer stung to think of it as it once had. Time did heal all wounds, or at the very least it made them clot. Shamefully, he would now go long stretches without even thinking of her, weeks and even months. A side-effect of living for as long as he had.

He was walking past the Tenth Division when he spotted the new captain, the child prodigy, Hitsugaya Toushirou. Hinamori-fukutaichou was chatting with him.

"The paperwork isn't too much, is it, Shirou-chan?"

The youth scowled, his spiky white hair flopping around in the breeze. "You should call me Hitsugaya-taichou now."

After that, he had taken a liking to Hitsugaya, which only seemed to confuse the boy. When an explanation was demanded, he had only smiled and said, "We're both Shirou-chan, aren't we?"