Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.
10 Themes
1. Compliment
The first compliment Rukia had ever given him concerned his eyes.
"They're grounding," she had said, while looking at anything but him. "Even when you're angry."
His eyes had been a private pride ever since.
2. Peace
Tōshirō loved peace, but even he couldn't deny that it could be wearisome after a while. Days blended together into winding loops of nothing. There were some mornings when he'd wake and go to a cold kitchen with a hot pot of tea on the stove—a new day, he'd think.
Only to realize two minutes later that he was intolerably bored.
3. Alike
The day Tōshirō stepped into his office with a green scarf wrapped around his neck, Matsumoto had grinned in mischievous delight.
"Captain!" she shouted, too loud for the still morning. "You look more like a Kuchiki each time I see you."
He shouted right back in an effort to hide the blush that had colored his cheeks.
4. Name
The control that she had over him was disgraceful. Tōshirō knew it the moment Rukia first said his name. She whispered those three common syllables by his ear, and in that dying instant, she had made him feel as though everyone had been saying it wrong his entire life.
5. Nerve
Hitsugaya Tōshirō was a man of many talents and skills.
Falling asleep quickly was not among them.
It was made worse by the fact that his overactive mind kept replaying the scene of Kuchiki Byakuya outright refusing his request to date his little sister. The audacity of that man to refuse him outright after he'd sat before him, man-to-man, with nothing but respect and genuine sincerity. He could've at least heard him out, but—
Tōshirō breathed to steady his spirit energy.
Soul King, if that man didn't loosen his overprotective hold on Rukia, then so help him, he'd do it himself. Fuck protocol.
He wasn't a noble.
6. Panic
Tōshirō faltered at the sight of Rukia's small shoulders hunched over. She looked fragile in a way he'd never seen before.
"Rukia," he called, closing the space between them with an urgency that made his head spin. "What's wrong?"
7. Aftermath
War had a way of leaving its mark on a person.
Whenever Tōshirō would enter a room, out of habit, he'd look over his shoulder for the glint of moonlight on steel. There were quite a few places for someone to hide in his home office. A folding screen in one corner, a tall desk covered with loose pages of paperwork that he needed to sign in another, and a narrow nook between a bookshelf and the wall. He spared each area a cursory glance.
In truth, he was prepared for enemies to rise forth from the flagstones and howl bursts of malicious energy at his ears. For trained men with swords too sharp for anything but killing to appear out of thin air, so they could nip at his skin with blades that even he'd have trouble evading—but none of that happened.
It was just his paranoia getting the better of him.
Again.
8. Moving
Momo was still there under all that anguish.
Odd, how after so many years of pulling back and forth with his childhood friend; of months on end without seeing each other for any decent amount of time; of trying to repair a relationship fractured by a man that he knew she still didn't fully hate after all he'd done, Tōshirō could still read her as easily as he could when he was a child.
When she offered him her congratulations regarding his engagement, he saw happiness limned with the slightest twinge of grief for a different today. For a future similar to the one they lived in now, but not quite so full of whorled clouds that made her wish so desperately for the pendulum to tick back the hours she spent—the hours she was still spending—lost.
Tōshirō didn't know how to fix her.
He had tried. Soul King knows he had tried.
But as the days pressed on and there was still no sign of recovery in her despondent eyes, he sometimes wondered if it was even his job to.
9. Coffee
Tōshirō was a caffeine junkie, and he had absolutely no qualms about admitting it.
The first time Rukia had come to his office and brewed the dark beverage that she'd brought with her from the human world, he had hated it. It was bitter to an intolerable degree. His tune changed when he realized that with every sip he took, his mind somehow managed to spawn another thread of sanity for him to hang onto, while he dealt with Matsumoto's incessant complaints about work that she never bothered to do in the first place.
10. Daily Grind
The pain of dealing with endless paperwork, stiff shoulders, and subordinates with too much ego and not enough skill—all of it—was so easily smoothed by this: his head in Rukia's lap, while she stroked his hair and occupied herself with a book.
Silent, save for the cicadas humming in the distance.
A/N: Please review.
