• Chapter 10
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    He ran his fingers through her hair, sweeping it out of her face. Slowly he kissed her, face, lips, neck… while one hand began pushing a blue kimono off her shoulder…

    Hitsugaya sat up abruptly, tears coursing down his cheeks. Damn. Daydreaming again.

    He was regaining his composure when Matsumoto breezed in with yet another stack of reports for him to read and sign.

    “Matsumoto?”

    “Hmm, taichou?”

    “You have been a shinigami far longer than I have… Do you remember anything about Kuchiki-taichou’s wife?”

    This was the last question she expected. She knew he had been moody lately… but why ask about this?

    “I would say ask Renji, except that was before his time. He’s the closest to Kuchiki-taichou now.” She really didn’t want to field his question. It was far easier to think of more recent times… say, when Renji, Rukia, Izuru, and Momo had all been in the Academy together, and Kuchiki had Rukia adopted into the family. She looked like the pictures… almost as if she were Kuchiki Hisana’s sister or something. Further back… was troublesome. Like when Kuchiki-san’s wife died. Or when Uruhara-taichou was condemned, and a number of captains and lieutenants had simply… disappeared. Of course Uruhara-san had escaped to the living world. But those were surely troubled times. She shook her head to herself. She almost had wished not to remember because it made her think of Gin, and his betrayal. Those days when he was still a lieutenant, when he was still… a friend. She shook her head to clear the train of thought.

    “He must have loved her a lot.”

    Matsumoto had been lost in her musing and came back to the present with a start. “Yes, he did. He adored her. She was graceful, and beautiful, and everyone who met her ended up admiring her. When she died… he was crushed… Somewhere along the line, he went from fierce, commanding, leading, to cold and aloof. As if… he didn’t want to let anyone in anymore. As if he were afraid to let himself care about anyone that much, ever again. I remember there was some uproar when he married her – it was definitely a love match, but for a commoner to marry into one of the Four Noble Houses was simply scandalous.” She really didn’t see what Hitsugaya was getting at with his line of questioning, though. Why did it matter about Kuchiki-taichou or Hisana-san?

    “I know he was there that night. That night. And since you must have smuggled… her… in through a private senkai, it is logical to assume that he must have offered the Kuchiki private entrance, or else you wouldn’t have even gotten her into Soul Society much less… sequestered like that.” It was still difficult to talk about. That night, that is. It felt as if his heart had been torn out and the jagged edges grated on his spirit every waking moment. “I was just wondering if maybe his rather uncharacteristic conspiratorial attitude had anything to do with his own grief, that’s all.” He pushed back his chair and stood up. “I’m going for a walk. Yes paperwork, no sake.”

    “Awwwww, taichou…..” A hit of sake would have really gone down well, too, after that conversation. Matsumoto suppressed a shiver. She really hadn’t wanted to remember any of that.
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    Hitsugaya went to his favorite thinking place. There was a hidden spot near where he had grown up, during the good days with Granny and Momo. It wasn’t far from that place, either. That magical night when he discovered… he almost…

    He shook his head. No use thinking about that now.

    His favorite tree was still there. Nestled in its branches, he could almost forget everything that troubled him. Whether it was Momo’s old friends – certainly hers but not his – and the way they avoided him, or the pressures of life as a captain, he could put it all aside when he was up here. And he certainly wanted to put life out of his mind right now. He was too heart-sore to want to feel much of anything, and here, he could just… let it go for a while.

    Or so he thought.
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    “Uh oh.”

    Rin was looking at a monitor in the 12th Division. His supervisor looked over his shoulder.

    “You do realize that ‘uh oh’ in the 12th can be a very dangerous thing to say,” he mused. “Is this an internal ‘uh oh’, an external ‘uh oh’, or…” – he shivered involuntarily – “a Kurotsuchi-taichou ‘uh oh’?”

    “Um, external, or should be. Remember that incident a few months ago with Hitsugaya-taichou and the woman Yamamoto-taicho-dono asked us to tag?”

    “Exactly what do you mean by ‘uh oh’ and ‘should be’?” This really didn’t sound good.

    Rin gulped. “We lost her.”

    “What do you mean, ‘lost her’?” This was bad. Very bad. Yamamoto-dono was going to have somebody’s head…

    “I mean her tag isn’t transmitting anymore. I’m tracing the log now. It was set to autocheck weekly, and her tag stopped transmitting… three days ago now. You know when he told us to tag her and put her back, Hitsugaya was restrained to the Eastern Hemisphere? Well, shinigami coverage for the Americas has never been that great to begin with – they can’t really communicate very well with the living people because of that language barrier unless somebody has some enormous spirit power, or has already become a soul separate from the body. So they’ve been pretty slack. Even after the audit after the incident with that woman. And… well…”

    “Well what?”

    “From what I can figure, she must have died… because the signal changed. Here, see – it was transmitting normally until here, about five days ago. Then the signal acted like it normally would for a soul… and then here, it looks almost as if…”

    “Just spit it out already.”

    “Almost as if she turned Hollow. And then was… taken care of… by a shinigami somewhere. But even with that, we should have traced the tag when she arrived on this end in Soul Society. But there’s no trace anywhere. None in the living world, none in Soul Society. It’s as if her soul wasn’t just purged, but…”

    “Don’t go there. We are in enough trouble. Just find her. If she really has died, Yamamoto-dono needs to take control of the situation before she gets here and – inevitably – makes contact with Hitsugaya-taichou. Unless, of course, you want a repeat of the first time she was brought here.”

    No, he didn’t. Especially with Kurotsuchi-taichou angry over losing a potential research subject. He didn’t even want to remember it much less repeat it.
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    Damn. I’m so screwed up, I’m seeing things. Hitsugaya had been comfortable in his thinking spot… until he started awake from another one of those daydreams and saw a flash of red half hidden by the leaves below him. It almost looked like… her. That auburn kind of red, and that blue dress she always wore while she was working.

    Except until a moment ago, he had been quite alone. And she was alive and well and untouchable and uncontactable in the living world, right? He couldn’t even check in on her since his activities had been summarily restricted by Yamamoto-dono. He rubbed his eyes and looked down again.

    It was her – or someone who looked exactly like her. His heart started racing. She hadn’t seen him yet, he was certain.

    He woke up Hyourinmaru. Well, maybe “poked at” would be a better term. They hadn’t at all been on good terms since… that night. Not that he blamed him. Hitsugaya had, after all, interrupted his friend and partner during rather – intimate – business and not only stopped the proceedings but sealed his mate away. He didn’t expect a lot of affection after that. But Hyourinmaru had acted sleepy ever since. Or half dead. Not much different from the way Hitsugaya himself had felt for several weeks. It was impossible to get coherent thought from him, and release was out of the question. It was just as well he had been more or less confined – they were no use in battle right now.

    Hyourinmaru was awake now – and so was Hitsugaya. They were keenly aware of the woman below. It looked like her – walked like her – but something wasn’t right. He needed to see if it were there, to be sure.

    The seal.

    If it were really Sharon, there would be a seal right over her heart, in the symbol of the 10th’s daffodil. The seal holding Oshidamaru in check, suspending her power. The seal he had placed on her himself.

    Except it was going to take some maneuvering to find out if it were there. And if it really were there, if this really were Sharon – he would have to find out what was wrong with her and how to get her back to herself again.