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Sixty Two	By : nausicaasmith Category: Bleach > General Views: 2164 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I don't own or profit from Bleach, I just borrowed the characters.

Chapter List
- 1-Sixty Two
- 1
Matsumoto Rangiku longed for the warm night air. She wanted to be outside, in a heady breeze
scented with clover and grass, listening to the crickets and the quiet rustle
of leaves. She wanted to lie on the
banks of the river and nurse a bottle of sake until the moon set and the Water
Bearer was high in the sky.

Instead, her steadfast loyalty kept her inside in the chilly
relief station tonight, at the bedside of her captain. He was excessively pale against the white
sheets. Whiter than she'd ever seen
him; she couldn't even make out the minute veins on his eyelids or the backs of
his hands. He'd lost a lot of blood in
that last mission--too much blood, Unohana had explained, for someone as small
as he was. And maybe it had been that
statement that made Matsumoto's eyes keep returning to the glowing bottom
number on the health monitor over his head.

62.

Below the impossibly low heart rate displayed on the
monitor, beneath the dangerous blood pressure reading and the temperature far
under what a living person's ought to be, was the number 62. It was such an arbitrary number, and so
faintly labeled that Matsumoto at first had wondered what it was. Squinting, she was able to see the little
abbreviation next to it: 'lb.'

Pounds. Sixty-two
pounds, that's what Hitsugaya Toshiro weighed.
Matsumoto stared at the number, then down at her captain. He hadn't woken since she'd brought him here
yesterday. A light sheen of sweat
covered his forehead and cheekbones, so she wiped it away with a damp cloth and
let her thoughts drift back to her earliest memories of him. He'd been such a tiny boy when she'd first
ran across him in the Rukongai. The
first time she'd sparred with him was the day after he'd been made her captain,
and she hadn't been able to stop grinning as they walked out to the training
grounds.

With his lightning fast flash steps and astounding
swordsmanship for one so young, he'd wiped that goofy grin off her face in two
minutes flat. He hadn't grown much
since she'd first met him, but she found that more and more over the next few
weeks, he was definitely a man in her eyes.
A short, round-faced, grumpy man that didn’t come up to her shoulder,
but still a man. She liked to tease him
so he'd make that cute frowny face, and she slacked off on paperwork because
hell, he was better at it than she was!
But she didn't see him as a child, the way she knew some of the other
captains did.

Matsumoto focused her gaze and found it resting on her
captain's hand, which lay next to his head on the pillow. His smallest fingers were curled in toward
the palm like a child's, and his fingernails were awfully purple. Matsumoto lifted the covers and tucked his
hands down over his chest, so he wouldn't be so cold. His hands were thin and icy.
She knew he was always cold, and in fact suffered much in hot
weather. He never bundled up against
the cold like others did in the winter, just tucked his hands into his
slightly-too-long sleeves and marched right through the biting wind and snow
without noticing those who shivered around him.

Which was odd, she thought, because people who were small or
thin were always more susceptible to cold temperatures in her experience. At sixty-two pounds he ought to have frozen
to death by now, surely? Matsumoto
tucked the covers a little tighter around him.
It must have something to do with Hyoinmaru. He’d said he dreamed of fields of ice; she imagined the arctic
winds in his mind and heart were far more powerful than the chill of the
training grounds in January. Matsumoto
imagined a little ice dragon sitting on Hitsugaya’s shoulder while he stood at
attention, giving orders to the troops before a mission.

The image of a shiny, grumpy little dragon riding around
that way made her chuckle, and the noise woke her captain. The blood loss hadn’t made his eyes any
paler, and for a second everything in Matsumoto’s world turned bright turquoise
as his eyes opened and fixed on her.
Inexplicably breathless, she stammered “Sorry, Captain. I didn’t mean to wake you. Look, I’m doing the paperwork!” She held up a stack of papers she’d brought
with her to keep busy. (The medical
unit’s magazines were very, very boring.)

The barest ghost of a smile touched his pale lips, and his
eyes fell shut again. She watched him
lie there for a minute, his breath shallow and face blanched, before she turned
her attention to the dreaded paperwork.
She’d best finish this report on their mission before morning. With Hitsugaya out of commission, she really
didn’t have a choice but to do it. Let’s
see… I took out 4 Hollows from my
station, and Captain got 17.

There was another one of those arbitrary numbers. Seventeen didn’t really mean anything here,
until you took in the fact that he’d done it by himself, without backup, while
injured and sleep-deprived. They’d all
appeared at once, and by the time Matsumoto had fended off the last one she was
battling and raced to his post, they’d all been dead and he was bleeding
heavily from a gash straight down his right forearm. At the time it hadn’t looked like all that much blood, but like
Unohana said, someone who only weighs sixty-two pounds doesn’t have all that
much blood to lose.

Matsumoto signed the report with a snort. Sixty-two pounds, and every ounce as hard
as nails.

It was almost dawn.
She got up, stretched, left her things by his bed because she’d return
before breakfast. But she’d best walk
down to the barracks and clear the empty bottles and trash out of their office
now, in case Unohana let him out early and he found them. Maybe he’d be awake when she got back.
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Sixty Two