He sat there at his window, smoking his pipe. It was night, and a soft breeze blue, making the bells in his hair jingle ever so slightly.

He sat there in casual torn robes, off duty.

"haaa, pupupupu"

He looked down on his knee, and a ghost of a smile touched his hard lips.

It wasn't the smile that he was famous for, the one that everyone feared to see, the one that promised death.

It was almost… fatherly.

There on his knee slept, perhaps his greatest weakness and at the same time his greatest strength.

Kusajishi Yachiru.

He remembered first seeing her, a pure child, a baby, inside the circle of death and blood that surrounded him. She had no fear.

That was perhaps why she meant so much to him. She was the first, and only perhaps, to hold him dear to herself without any fear. She was the only person who could poke fun at him, the only who was capable of slapping and kicking him if he did something stupid without fear.

She was his only family.

A cold wind blew through the windowsill and she shivered slightly.

Picking up the small blanket he had draped on a nearby chair, he quickly covered her, and a small smile did curve across his lips as she snuggled under the warmth of the blanket and his hand, sucking her thumb.

He had never had a family, never known his parents, abandoned to his death as a child.

He did not know how to be a father.

He didn't even really know what a father was.

It didn't matter to her.

He meant everything in the world to her.

She meant everything in the world to him.

In the morning they would return. He would become his usual self, obsessed with only being the strongest. She would continue to be a flower thriving in a land of rocks, bringing smiles to the men under him, however unwillingly.

But for now, she was a child.

And he, he was an adult.

That was enough