Characters: Ukitake, Nanao
Summary: It's over before it even begins. Ukitake x Nanao.
Pairings: Ukitake x Nanao
Warnings/Spoilers: None
Timeline: Pre-manga
Author's Note: If any of you watch CSI, then this should strike a familiar chord.
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.

Sometimes, if a decision isn't reached, then it already has been.

It was something he had always longed for but had been afraid to reach for—life was so short and he was so ill. She was so young, especially compared to him, and though she had wanted it he wasn't sure she knew what she was getting into, attaching herself to him.

For one as old as Ukitake, it was all too easy to see her as a child. Everything she did—her clothes, the way she wore her hair, her whole demeanor and disposition—was meant to make her seem older than she was, but it fell flat to Ukitake's old brown eyes. But for all her quietness, her young, fresh face and her small, childish bones, Ise Nanao, Ukitake was about to learn the hard way, was not a child.

Shunsui had convinced him to take her on patrol. Ukitake had tried to shelter the Ise girl but in the end, she took charge and Ukitake watched in shock as the little girl—the young woman, he told himself after that—cut down Hollow after Hollow, shikai poised and kido at the ready.

By the time he stopped seeing her as a child, her smiles were rapidly vanishing, and she asked him again, just as silent as before, with her serious blue-violet eyes open wide and her hands outstretched. And Ukitake's response was just a different one, but one that did not frustrate her any less, as he grasped her outstretched hands and said,

"Give me time."

Ukitake could only say that so many times, he discovered, before Nanao took matters into her own hands, and not in a way he would have liked.

No one had the sort of patience that allowed them to wait forever, and while Shinigami bore much longer life spans than the living, they were just the same in this respect. While Ukitake vacillated, Nanao was making up her mind, and eventually came to the conclusion that it couldn't go on.

She gets up, and walks away.

As Ukitake, shocked and wounded, holds out a hand and calls her back, Nanao has only one thing to say.

"You never decided, and I think we both know what that means. I'm sorry. I can't wait forever."

The only hope left is that when he comes to her with his decision, that she'll believe him.

They both regret it, but know that what they have will never be more than what it is now, and Ukitake stares down at his open hand and knows that it was never enough. The child who ran in the shadow of her captain and her lieutenant and gave him bright, lingering stares is now the woman who sits with him when he coughs in the night but is always gone by morning.

The woman who knew what indecision meant.