It Takes Time
By: Le tired
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach or its characters, blah blah blah, etc.
Rated: M.
Author's Notes: So, I had to include a nod to the scene in Bleach that ultimately inspired me to write this fic—the Shinigami Illustrated (episode 135 for anyone who hasn't seen it yet) where the two of them clean up all that garbage together and Matsumoto ends up ordering Hitsugaya around, and when I first saw it, I was like, 'Holy shit they're totally like a married couple!'. Like I think I said before, I originally just wanted to write goofy snapshots of the two of them living together in the human world with maybe a few kissy scenes. The story has obviously evolved since then and has taken on a much more heartfelt narrative than I'd originally intended and that's fine since it's very emotionally satisfying to write like this too, but I do love my screwball comedy. So I wanted to write at least a few other funny instances where they'd have to tackle stuff other couples do (the last scenario, in particular, I've heard guys talk about when they first move in with their girlfriends). It's a fluffier chapter, but I like to think it helps to give a sense of the day-by-day interactions I imagined Hitsu and Matsu having when they aren't killing filler Hollows. 'Cuz sometimes love isn't about kissing and passion, and it's more about taking out the garbage right :P.
kriitiko: It definitely is! Thanks again, and I hope you enjoy this latest installment!
Prince of Winter Dragons: Aww thanks again, your reviews always make me feel better when I'm doubting my writing :). Hahahahaha no they haven't sex—that's a great euphemism, by the way, I haven't heard it in a long time :P. It's definitely happening soon, but I haven't completely figured out which events to sort of center it around for the deepest emotional impact and all that. And while I don't want to put sex up on a pedestal as the greatest most magical gesture of love or anything, I think especially for Hitsugaya, it would be a pretty big moment since he doesn't open himself up to many people. But yep, it's coming!
sagitgirlth: Thank you as always!
Michele Uchiha: Wow, that's amazing! Haha if you can read fanfics in English, then I think your English is probably pretty good! Better than my Spanish, anyway :P. Thanks again for reviewing. I don't want to leave this fic unfinished either, so I'm working hard on it. I haven't had a chance to actually catch up on the manga, but from everything that I've heard, it sounds like Toshirou is still alive and Kubo Tite was quoted as saying Rangiku was important to the storyline, so there's at least some chance they'll be okay, I hope!
Nanami B: Thank you, and I thank your friends too for suggesting Bleach fics! It's really cool that you were willing to give the HitsuMatsu pairing a try. Their interactions make me smile a lot too, and I guess I wanted more of that, so I started writing my own goofy stories. I hope you continue to enjoy the chapters!
Chapter 32
"Matsumoto, is this the last of your laundry?!" Toshirou called as he dumped more clothing into the machine. "If not, you'd better hurry and bring the rest over. I'm not waiting around any longer. This place is in serious need of cleaning," he added, more to himself, as he started to close the lid.
"Ah, wait one more minute, taichou!" Matsumoto ran into the room, her arms filled with another bundle of clothes he'd somehow managed to miss although he'd gone room to room picking up every garment he laid his eyes on. "Here! Here!"
It was an entire other load. He'd only expected maybe two or three more pieces of clothing, not a second heap. How on earth did she have so much clothing? "That's too much for one load, Matsumoto," Toshirou told her. "It'll have to wait." He turned back to the machine.
"EHH? But, I took the time to bring it all down here!"
"You were too late. And this wouldn't even be a problem if you washed your clothes on a regular basis!"
"But taichou, I do! I do laundry every three months! That's when I start to run low on clothing. But it seems silly and wasteful to do it before then, you know? I have so many possible outfits I can wear—"
"Then you have too many clothes! Stop buying more!" He turned the dial on the machine to thirty minutes with a loud angry crank.
Matsumoto kept pouting at him. "Taichou…can't we do this batch first? It's really important."
Toshirou sighed. His finger hovered on the 'Start' button. Just push it, a voice inside him urged. "Why?"
"Becaaause…" Matsumoto deepened her pout. "It's my panties."
"…"
"And if I left them here for you, you'd get to paw through them and ogle them to your heart's content. And that's just wrong, taichou! I mean, I know you're a gentleman, but you're still a man. And what man—" she dug through the pile in her arms.
"Don't show me," he warned.
"—could resist this?" She brought out a red-hot thong with pink ties and dangled it at him.
"I said don't show me!"
"Or this?" She held out a black bottom, so lacy it was see-through. "Or this?" This time, it was a skimpy piece (he couldn't seriously refer to it as an article of clothing) consisting of three pieces of golden fabric held together by a single hoop.
"All RIGHT, Matsumoto! We'll do that load first!" He spun back to the machine and started hefting out all the clothes, still covered in soapy detergent, onto the top of the dryer.
"Oh no, would you try to sniff them? Kyaahh, taichou, don't be a pervert!" Matsumoto continued behind him, clearly having departed the realm of reality and was now happily ensconced in this fantasy world where he was a slavering panty-obsessed degenerate and even more unbelievably, she was someone with the moral rectitude to actually care.
"Stop daydreaming and just give me those!" He yanked the clothes from her, trying not to think about what exactly he was tugging at.
"Oh my, you want to take them that badly, taichou?" Matsumoto bent and peered to one side at Toshirou as he dumped his new stock into the washing machine. He glimpsed splashes of bright pinks and leopard spot patterns as they tumbled into the tub. "Please don't try to sneak any into your pockets, Hitsugaya-taichou. I'm flattered you like them so much, but it'll be troublesome for me if you take them. They're really cute and one of a kind, you see."
He shook out some detergent liquid, substituting the jug for Matsumoto's neck in his own fantastical daydream, and slammed the lid, which made a hollow clang that resonated through the room. The sound was soon followed by a rumbling whirr as the wash started.
His arms were sticky where he'd inadvertently touched laundry detergent when he'd shuffled the clothes back and forth, not to mention he felt dirty all over from touching Matsumoto's underwear. He prepared to leave and head to the nearest sink where he could wash his hands properly.
"AH! Taichou!"
Matsumoto's shriek of disapproval alarmed him. "What?!"
"You have to separate the panties based on the materials they're made of! Lace panties can't get mixed in with cotton panties! They'll be stained! You have to separate them by color! You can't just throw them all in the same wash! AHH! And you have to use the 'delicates' setting or they'll be ripped apart!"
"R-really?" Toshirou's mind reeled from the onslaught of this new information. It had never seemed to matter when he washed his own Shinigami uniforms, which were of sturdy fabric. Anything more delicate, like his nicer kimonos (which he didn't even wear once a year), he liked to wash and dry by hand, the way Granny did.
"Do it again!" Matsumoto commanded with an authoritative sweep of her arm.
"Yes…" He opened the machine again and started bringing the clothes back out. There was something very wrong about this situation.
There was something very wrong with the apartment.
Well, besides the inherent wrongness of living in the sea of worn clothes, junk food bags and wrappers, and old fashion and gossip magazines it had become. Matsumoto was like a garbage truck in reverse. Sometimes, Toshirou seriously thought she was going out back to where he'd thrown out the trash, and bringing it back in to spread on the floor just to malign him (though he knew that took way too much creativity and effort on her part; there were easier ways to get on his nerves and she knew them all). But after years of putting up with Matsumoto's slovenly ways in their office, as much as he was loath to admit it, he'd grown accustomed to cleaning up after her.
This, however, was an entirely new development.
Hair.
Hair everywhere. Wisps and curls of reddish-blond hair in the most random locations. And accumulating at an alarming pace.
He'd noticed it first when he was changing for bed, and found a single strand on his shirt. He'd picked it off and dropped it in the nearest wastebasket without much thinking. Matsumoto was around him (and on him) often enough that it made sense that it might have transferred from her to him.
The next night, as he sat on the sofa with Matsumoto while she watched some inane drama on the television that seemed to mostly consist of the characters crying and screaming at one another, he cracked open a book he'd found on one of Inoue's shelves to see what it was humans were reading these days. And found a strand of hair, neatly tucked in the groove where the pages were bound to the spine. He'd brushed it off with his hand, still not thinking much of it. It was probably Inoue's.
But the one he found on his pillow later that night was definitely not, and that was a little irritating. Of course, Matsumoto ended up half on his bed every night. Toshirou had only seen her asleep on the office couch where she hadn't had much space to move, but he'd quickly learned that given the room to freely move, a sleeping Matsumoto would take advantage of all the space allowed her. She had a tendency to roll around and somehow end up twisting his sheets away from him and onto her. She also moved her limbs a great deal. More than once, he'd awoken in the middle of the night to find himself missing all his blankets and with her hand smushed into his face. He rarely felt cold, so the blanket-hogging wasn't so much of an issue, but it sure would have been a pleasant turn of events if Matsumoto had even once rolled away from him in the night instead of towards. Another time, he'd woken gagging as she'd managed to back so far into him that her hair was all but choking his nose and mouth. So, the hair wasn't unexpected, but it was still unsightly.
Then, he'd found one between his teeth while they were eating dinner one night, and that definitely should not have been there. Speechless, he pulled it out and just held it out in front of him. Matsumoto, busy scarfing down her own food, didn't notice, and he was still in too much shock to call out to her. He just stared at the long blond monstrosity dangling before him. Where had it come from? He checked himself over. Could it really have floated all the way over to him from where Matsumoto was sitting? He didn't see any hairs on him…wait. His eyes zeroed in on another strand curling lazily on the side of his pants. And another hanging off his right sleeve. Good. God. He was covered.
From there on out, his eyes seemed to become attuned to the detection of Matsumoto hairs. He started seeing them everywhere. On the floor, clumped in the corners of each room. On the sofa where they sat. On the coffee table where they ate (since Inoue's broken kitchen table was no longer an option). The hairs were everywhere. His bed and clothing were a lost cause, no matter how meticulously he shook them out each day, and for every hair he managed to find and remove from his food or drink, he was certain two managed to sneak his way into his gullet. It felt like a curse. Or maybe the apartment was haunted by some malevolent and hairy spirit—which was possibly the most asinine thought he'd had yet since they were the spirits occupying the apartment and their jobs centered around identifying otherworldly entities.
It had been building in his mind for some time, and then one night, when he walked into the bathroom, what he saw caused him to finally snap. "MATSUMOTO!"
"Taichou?" she called placidly from the other room.
"Get over here NOW."
"Ehh? But my TV show—"
"NOW."
"So mean! There's no need to yell, taichou." Matsumoto presently joined him in the bathroom, scratching absently at the back of her head (and probably dislodging a few more strands as she did so). "So, what is it you wanted to see me about, taichou?"
He gestured at the countertop of the bathroom sink. He could count at least ten individual hairs lying there, taunting him. "Can you explain to me what your hair is doing there?"
"What do you mean, taichou? It's just lying there because that's where I normally brush my hair every night before I go to bed."
"There's one on the mirror! And look at the ones on the floor! Matsumoto, your hair is everywhere. It's making everything more of a mess than it already is. Start picking up after yourself!"
"EHH?! That's not fair, Hitsugaya-taichou!" Matsumoto straightened to her full height and stationed her hands on her hips. "I pick up after myself all the time!"
"How so?!" He wanted to grab the hairs by the sink and shake them in her face. Did she not see them? In what upside-down world would this constitute as picking up after oneself?
"Look, taichou!" She walked over and pointed to the bathtub. He turned to follow her finger and saw a white plastic dome-shaped cover over the drain, with holes all around its sides. "You see that, taichou?"
"Yes." He frowned. He'd noticed it when he'd bathed, but just chalked it up to another new luxury human invention he had no need to explore.
"That, taichou, is a hair catcher for the bathtub. It catches all the hair we wash out so it doesn't clog the drain. If I didn't empty that out every day, all the hair would stop and back up the water, and then we'd flood the bathroom!"
"Flood the bathroom?" For real? The thought of a curse was back in full swing. Toshirou's mind conjured up disjointed mental images of drowned female spirits with long black hair dripping with water crawling out of the drain—stories and urban legends he'd heard as a child.
"Mm-hm!" Matsumoto nodded emphatically. "And I should tell you, taichou, while it's mostly my beautiful, silky hair, some of it IS yours too! So you should be thanking me for my great diligence, not yelling at me!"
"I-I see…thank you." Now that she'd mentioned it, he recalled seeing clumps of set hair in the bathroom waste can, so he knew Matsumoto wasn't lying. But that just made things scarier. It spoke to the sheer volume of hair that was being shedded on a daily basis that they could both be cleaning it up and more was quickly found. Honestly, he couldn't understand it. By his calculations, Matsumoto should have been bald by now. "It's just…so much hair."
"That's a natural part of living with a woman, taichou! I wouldn't expect you to understand since you're an antisocial grump who's never had a girlfriend…"
"Oi…"
"…But now you know! So be grateful! A woman's hair is her greatest pride and beauty! You've been blessed by the goddess of fortune to be living under the same roof as a woman with such lovely hair!" Matsumoto swept her hand across the breadth of the bathroom. "Now that you know better to doubt me, you should clean up the rest of the hair!"
"Yes…" He bent down to start sweeping up the hair strands with a tissue. There was something very wrong about this situation too.