Her Guardian Angel.
Chapter One.
Karin snuggled down deep into her blankets, drawing the comforter up to her chin with only her small, cold hands poking out to hold the thick, dark bound tome in her hands. The leather was worn to near non-existence along the spine, thin cracks marred the front and back of it, breaking up the words scrawled in messy gold ink on it. She shivered against the cold of her old, broken down apartment. The heating had broken long ago and she didn't have enough money to pay to fix it, since the landlord paid no attention to anything that happened in the building anyway. The screaming of the couple down the hall filled her ears but she dismissed it as she usually did; it was commonplace now.
She leafed through the pictures in the book. They were all of her and her family. There were pictures of her mother, her father, her sister, and her brother. There were pictures of them when they were young and when they were older. She bit her lip as she got into the later pictures, none of which held the scowling face of her brother. He was already gone by then. She ran a finger over her brother's picture of him graduating high school. Her dad stood proudly behind him with goofy grin on his face. Next to those pictures were the ones of Karin and Yuzu graduating together. Their brother was nowhere to be found.
Ichigo vanished just a few weeks after he graduated high school. He left no note, no message, no sign that he had even been planning on leaving, and nobody knew where he had gone. Yuzu had sobbed every night and Karin kept having dreams of her brother being killed in car crashes, plane crashes, wild fires, drowning, and tornadoes among other things. Each one put more fear into her heart than the last but no matter how hard they tried, they could never find him.
Her teeth dug deeper into her lower lip as she got to where the pictures of her father ended. The last one was of him, her, and Yuzu all standing together at Yuzu's graduation from University. He was smiling cheerfully and holding up bunny ears behind his daughter's heads when he thought they weren't paying attention. But he was gone too. Kurosaki Isshin was killed in a brutal car crash just two days after his daughters' graduation. They were barely able to identify his body when they found him. The drunk driver who hit him survived.
But the hardest part was when she reached the back of the book where the pictures ended completely. The last one was of her and Yuzu standing back-to-back looking at the camera with their arms intertwined beside them. Karin was smiling in the picture. It had been taken at their twenty-fourth birthday party. The next day, Yuzu was shot twice in the head and once in the stomach by an ex-boyfriend who was jealous of her newest lover.
The young Kurosaki slammed the book shut and threw it to the floor, careful not to hurt it but still wanting to burn it in the dying fire in the hearth. She angrily wiped a tear away from her face. She was the last remaining Kurosaki. Her mother died when she was young, Ichigo left when she was in middle school, her father died when she was eighteen, and her sister died when she was twenty-four. She shivered and pulled the blanket tighter around her.
The most independent part of her mind, the strongest, told her that she should just pick up the pieces of her life and move on. It had been three years since Yuzu died and left her all alone. She hadn't gone to see her family's graves. It was always too painful. It was only now that she realized how much it must have hurt to loose a family member, she had lost four. Her old friends from high school called every once in a while to see how she was doing, they always tried to avoid talking about her family.
She worked as a waitress now at a local café, a far cry from the soccer star she had wanted to be when she was younger. She used to teach soccer to small children on the side but she had stopped a year previously when she took on a little girl who looked almost exactly like Yuzu had when they were young. It hurt too much to see that smiling face every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday.
Speaking of working, she had to be at the café in fifteen minutes. It took half an hour to get there. She stumbled up from her couch and pulled a windbreaker on over her rumpled t-shirt and halfheartedly dusted off her black pants. She pulled her black trainers when she reached the door and grabbed her messenger bag purse from its spot on the coat hanger before walking out the door, combing her hair with her fingers as she went.
The snow swirled around her in a maddening dance of snowflakes and stinging hail. She pulled her hood up around her face and tried to ignore it. She was usually good at ignoring the weather, it wasn't like it was going to kill her, and if it did then she was gladly accept it. A few people driving by on their way to work looked at her like she was crazy; it wasn't like she had a car to ride in anyway.
When she reached the café she pushed it open, ignoring the closed sign on the door. They hadn't opened yet, which means they were probably waiting for her to finally get there to start working on the tea. She sighed and slumped past Aiko, who stood completely still at the table near the door that she had been wiping down. Aiko was afraid of her, well, everyone on staff was afraid of her but Aiko was more so. Who wouldn't be afraid of a woman who had threatened you with a slow and very detailed death if she got in her way or asked about her personal life?
On Aiko's first day, a few months ago, she had asked Karin about her family in an attempt to get to know the gloomy employee. Karin had rounded on her with eyes blazing and told her in a very monotone and venomous voice that if she ever asked about her family again she would personally cut out her heart, grind it up in a blender, and make her drink it down with her last breath. The seventeen-year-old never spoke another word to Karin past, 'could you pass me that' or 'do you know where this or that is'.
Karin didn't even bother mumbling a good morning to her and instead stumped into the kitchen and pulled on her ugly pink apron, checking herself into work with a blank expression. Maura, the only person who would talk to her conversational gave her a slightly cheerful 'ohayo' but Karin ignored her and plodded into the kitchen where she shoved a teakettle onto the stove and turned the oven on. She jerked her stringy black hair back into a loose ponytail and set about her work efficiently and monotonously.
"Karin-chan?" Maura asked, peeking her head into the kitchen. A few other members of staff watched warily. Karin's mood in the morning generally dictated who would have kitchen duty with her. The younger, newer staff members were always kept away from her if she was feeling murderous.
"What?" the Kurosaki snapped impatiently as she dragged down a bag of tea leaves from one of the high shelves above the double sink.
"Ano… are you feeling okay?" Karin slammed her fists onto the countertop and fought to keep herself from shaking. She knew that Maura was only trying to help her but there were times when she just wanted to shake the girl for being so damned friendly.
"Do I look okay to you?" she screeched, whirling around. Her dark hair sprayed out behind her and whipped her face, making her look all the more insane. The dark circles under her black eyes didn't do much to help things either.
"Alright, Karin-chan, I'll leave you alone then," Maura murmured as she shrank quickly out of sight, closing the kitchen door behind her. The only one who had any control of Karin when she was angry was their boss, Harumi-san, and that was only because she had the power to fire the half-insane woman because she needed the money from her job. Everyone knew that Harumi-san only kept Karin on staff because she felt sorry for the young woman.
The day dragged on and Karin was kept in the kitchen all day, as she normally was on the days when she was acting even more schizophrenic, or when there were small children present in the café. If there was one thing Karin could do, it was cook. She might not have the culinary genius that her sister had but she wasn't too shabby. Unfortunately, she was liable to murder any child that crossed her path for so much as glancing at her. It hadn't been that way when she was first hired two years ago but when she stopped teaching soccer she was completely against any and all children, and most everybody else.
The normal shift for the café workers was six hours, Karin worked thirteen. She had nothing better to do with her life and she claimed that working kept her mind off other things, not the she ever specified what exactly she was getting her mind off of. She worked from the time that the café opened to the time it closed, even if she never got there on time or left when she was supposed to, everything depended on her unpredictable mood swings.
As Karin wiped down the last table and wandered through the darkened café, pulling her belongs out of the various places they had been moved to during the day. She stiffened when she heard the door to the café open again. She could have sworn she locked it. If there was one thing that made her really nervous, it was being alone in a room with a stranger. She peeked out into the main room and saw a young man standing there.
He was tall, probably closer to six feet than five, with ivory hair tied back in a small pony tail at the base of his neck and wisps of it falling around his face, jagged on the ends. His skin was pale but from where she stood she could see the faint tracing of scars on his hands and wrists. He wore a three piece black suit and a teal tie and she couldn't see any trace of a heavy jacket. His back was to her at the moment but he half turned and she got a good look at his profile.
His nose was small and the bridge of it was slender, his lips were thin but not unattractively so and were set in a frozen line of displeasure, his chin was tapered but not feminine, his eyebrows were as pale as his hair and thin, snapped down over his eyes. His eyes; they caught her attention the most. They were an unnatural blue-green color and though they seemed angry, or bored, they were beautiful and framed by thin, defining pale lashes. Everything about him spoke of the cold, his stance, his face, his appearance. Her heartbeat quickened but she didn't move.
"I know you are back there," he said quietly. His voice was deep and commanding and she felt like she was going to die. She stepped back away from the doorframe and leaned against the wall inside the kitchen. "I am not going to harm you, Kurosaki Karin," he called to her.
"How do you know my name?" she asked nervously.
"I have known your name for a long time, Kurosaki-san." Somehow, that didn't make her feel any better.
Oh shit, I have a stalker, she thought to herself. She reached into her purse and pulled out her mace. She held it neatly in her thin hands and took a deep breath. She could hear his footsteps as he walked over to where she was, but the near-silent sound stopped before she could figure out where he was precisely.
"You really should not assume that everyone is going to hurt you, Kurosaki-san." Her head snapped around so fast she felt it vertebrae crack. There, standing in front of her with one freezing, long fingered hand wrapped around her wrist, was the man. There was no expression on his face but the lack thereof still didn't make her any more comfortable.
Her eyes narrowed and all her self-defense classes from when she was a kid came flooding back. She twisted her hand in his grip until she held the inside of his wrist, jerked him forward, and slammed her knee into his groin all in the same motion. He winced and released her instantly, falling unceremoniously to the ground. She jumped away and ran.
The icy wind snapped around her faster than it had previously, when she had gone to work. She hoped her boss wouldn't get mad at her but she wasn't about to go back and lock up. She was almost sure Harumi-san wouldn't fire her. She pulled out her cell phone to call the police but the crappy device showed that she had no battery power. She cursed and dropped it back into her purse as she ran.
White puffs of breath formed on the air as she panted. It had been a while since she had run any long distance, her boss really didn't require her to get to work in a timely manner so she always walked to work. She pulled her jacket on as she sprinted. A few people watched her from shop windows as they closed as she darted past but she paid them no mind, it wasn't like she was going to ever see them again.
Distant, closed off memories knocked discretely at her conscious mind. There was a flash of white in her memory, a soccer game, someone saving her. She shook her mind. Perhaps these were significant things when she was young by why would she care to look back on the past now?
"That was a low blow, Kurosaki-san," a voice said from beside her. She skidded to a stop and whirled around, a punch already loaded and ready to fire at the stupid man. Her fist shot out and he caught it in his hand, twisting her arm slightly to get her off balance and sweeping her legs out from underneath in with ease. She fell to the icy sidewalk with a low grunt of surprise.
"What do you want from me?" she screamed at him. He glanced around for a moment and she realized that the people in the store that they were in front of were watching with shocked expressions on their faces, one had a cell phone loosely in their grasp. He reached down and snatched her up, whisking her away down a dark side street that held nothing more than garbage and emancipated cats.
"I want you to gain control of yourself, Kurosaki-san."