Sometimes I write a chapter purely to make myself go "Awww."
This is one of them.
.
A longstanding rumor throughout the Tenth Division—and, honestly, all of Seireitei—was that Captain Hitsugaya never slept. If he did, the common consensus was that he simply lay in an empty room, either on the floor or a simple cot, because he needed to be as cold as possible so that he could maintain his power. The rumor had it that to step into Captain Hitsugaya's bedchamber was to step into a freezer. Most souls, reaper or otherwise, couldn't even survive in his private sanctum; it was simply too cold. It froze the blood solid.
The truth was much simpler.
Toshiro Hitsugaya was, at the end of the day, a spirit like any other. While it was true that he tended to be more comfortable in cold weather, and much preferred the winter months to summer, this did not make him a creature with literal ice in his veins, nor did it mean that his bedchamber doubled as a larder for perishable foods. Hitsugaya himself was largely unaware of these rumors because nobody was dumb enough to approach him to them; but Matsumoto knew.
Hitsugaya liked the cold, but that didn't mean he hated warmth.
In point of fact, he slept in a bed like anyone else, curled up in sheets and blankets like anyone else. He even had a favorite blanket, as it turned out, and Matsumoto didn't think she'd ever been less than surprised than when she found out that his once-bright-blue—now quite faded to grey—blanket had been hand-crocheted by his grandmother. The only wrinkle in the equation was the added context that Momo Hinamori was the one to save up her salary for several months to afford the yarn.
By now, the blanket was too small for him, and Matsumoto was quite sure that it didn't do much of anything in terms of keeping her captain warm at night, but Hitsugaya insisted that it did. He said that his grandmother's blanket was all he needed to be properly comfortable in bed, no matter how frigid the night was, even though—more often than not—Matsumoto would catch him with his shins poking out from the bottom edge of the thing.
"You don't understand," Hitsugaya would say. "Nana isn't just any craftsman. It doesn't matter how it looks. The point is that it works. Better than anything the Court has to offer. I'll stake my salary on it."
Matsumoto didn't have the heart to press him on this.
It was just a little blanket that an old lady crocheted for her grandchild.
No different from any other blanket for any other grandchild.
This wasn't to say that Hitsugaya's grandmother hadn't done a good job; she'd surely crafted a lovely piece of work. But whatever magic Hitsugaya insisted was a part of it, Matsumoto was quite sure wasn't real.
In the end, it didn't seem to matter all that much.
If it made her captain happy, and it helped him sleep, then that was magic enough.