Love until it hurts.
He had known from the moment they met that she would not and could not ever learn to truly love him, at least not in the way he loved her. Regardless, he decided that he would have her, and because he was the head of the Kuchiki Clan, he got exactly what he wanted.
She was not an unfeeling woman, but she was a woman with a purpose, and that purpose was to find her sister. She was never able to understand exactly what it was that had made him love her, and on particularly bad nights she would stay awake to watch him breathe, and she would brush the hair back from his face and touch his cheek and she would wonder.
He tried, at first, to make her love him. He could be a demanding man, and as such it should have been easy to take exactly what was due to him. One look into the stories written in her eyes and the sound of her voice, however, shattered his resolve, and he would be left to smile a little sadly every time she asked him what was wrong and insist that everything was perfectly all right.
She tried, more than once, to feel as he felt, and when she failed for the last time she resolved instead to give back as much of it as she could, to show gratitude, at least, for him being a good husband to her and attempting with each new day to give her the world. It bit at her heart, the small pouch of affection she gave to him in return for his bag of silver and jewels and gold.
He held her hand through the fever dreams, up until the morning of plum blossoms when her spirit left her with her final breath.
Although she had never possessed the resolve to show it, she remembered, all throughout her final moments, the soothing coolness of his palm.