In a different life, it starts with a snail.
"Gather round, folks fair and unfair alike." Karin grins and strums a chord on her guitar, and the children and the gnome waitress and the tall creatures all turn to here in amusement. There's a ghost of a girl there, Karin tells herself often with a crowd like this, that nobody can see, and there's a ghost of a seesaw in the cobbled pavement, and there's ghost of another girl, and they sit in the middle of the seesaw, in the middle of the street, filtered by the sunlight. "This story starts with a snail."
A pretty snail, its shell streaked in many shades. Sapphire for the sky, emerald for the grass, amethyst for the wind formed by butterfly wings, there are topaz spots just because every shell must have a centre. It's a diamond in the rough, brilliant by child's play. They called it Gem, other times Pretty, and never knew if it was a girl snail or a boy snail.
"And then one day, a girl met a boy."
She smirks, and for a second, out of the corner of her eye, she cannot remember why.
"Did they fall in love?"
Karin shakes her head, and strands of hair fall past her ears. "No." That would have been too easy, even for them. Instead, as she plucks more notes to make another melody fall apart, tests her laughter to harmonize with a ditty, and isn't surprised that the result is a clash instead. "He stepped on the snail."
Splattered remains on a hot day, flecks of acrylic sticking on the soles of his shoe. It echoes even now, stones resounding with every step taken towards her.
"That's not how it happened." Soot-stained and grinning, Karin hears his voice and looks up to seek him out. His red hair is blackened at the tips and as he steps forward in his arrogant swagger, dust transfers to the air and the creases of his cotton t-shirt spread snugly across his chest. "We didn't meet like that."
"I know." Karin smiles a little wistfully, and she sees it perfectly, the ghost of a boy who weighed too heavy and made the seesaw slant and the two ghost girls tumble towards him, giggling with carefree glee, his breath warm and kissing the inside of her wrist. He wore stripes that day. The sun is warm on her skin, but his crooked mouth is cigarette kissed and burning away the veins in her arms, and it sears her like she's been touched by charcoal freshly licked by fire. "But we could have."
There are pixies dozing in the violet flowerbeds, skin mirroring the underside of the petals. Karin is tempted to blow on their faces, to see if one might wake and begin to speak, voice too angry and high-pitched to be understood. Renji crouches beside her. In his hand is a clump of soil, and without prompting he sprinkles it over their tiny grass-green clothes.
"You're terrible." Karin whispers, mouth curving slightly. One pixie shifts, but does not stir.
"And you're not stopping me." Renji whispers back, matching her expression as he meets her eyes. It's true, she isn't. "Besides, it's not like they pay for the rent, is it?"
Sunsets are chemical induced and smothered by fumes, and they silhouette the sweat on Renji's muscles. The twilight nights where even the stars are smudged out of existence are the nights Renji takes her with him to promenade the skies and walk on uneven platforms of smoke and the mornings after when Karin wakes up and notices her boots flyspecked with cloud residue, spat at with black salt.
Karin is slow to open the curtain, stealing the paper thin duvet and draping it around her body first, though she's long since adjusted to the cold light of morning, and smiles when she sees tiny mud handprints dried on the dirty window. She can't count how many pixie handprints are needed to be the equivalent of one human hand.
"Morning," a familiar voice rumbles behind her, and she turns to face Renji, the shape of her mouth changing into something a little lazy and lopsided. "Come back to bed."
"'kay." Karin murmurs, and wonders if this time she'll tug his hair hard enough he'll give her bruises. His lips are dry when she kisses him, and when she pulls back and lowers her head to his shoulder, Karin closes her eyes.
On Wednesdays, Karin cleans the apartment in Renji's shirt that he no longer uses but still smells like him. Renji tends to rearrange books, clothes, cutlery drawers and other kitchenware. Afterwards, they play the greatest cacophony they can think of using Renji's voice and random guitar chords, lying on an imaginary sun-scorched meadow, stalks scratching their spines and sandals kicked away on the hot pavement. They try and make the gold birds scatter, and nearly always fail. They're not quite up to par being scarecrows, but the few days in which they succeed are the days in which their neighbour is particularly grumpy. Karin's never bothered to ask why, but complies when he knocks on their door and says that the music is too loud.
"Is it?" Karin can't help but smile, her guitar still in her hand and hidden behind the half-open door. Toushirou is an odd person and seeing him have a frown twisting his face is always a light sort of entertainment. "I'm sorry; we didn't mean to disturb you."
"Hm." He's not a bad neighbour, not really. Although maybe she and Renji are.
"We'll try to keep it down." Renji calls in the back, and an irrepressible smirk forms on Karin's face, because that's not what he meant at all.
"See that you do." Whether he notices or not, Karin is biting her tongue for at least half a minute until she gets her giggles under control and shuts the door.
The actual park nearby is a wasteland, and black birds live there, preferring trees stripped bare instead of dressed up in leaves. But Karin finds inspiration in its tranquillity, when it rains, and before the rust on the swing sets occurs, when it's silent or when the pillywiggins come out to play. They pester her and trade nonsense lyrics for pretty tunes, whimsical muses for clumsy dances and graceless laughter. They gossip news, and press their ears to her heart wondering how it exists and yet does not exist. How did it happen?
"I sold it," she answers honestly, each and every time, "for a pocketful of thimbles."
They never know what she means and Karin never elaborates, and charms them to play silly games in order to make the flowers grow.
One day she will make a song out of that, too.
It doesn't mean she can't feel.
It doesn't mean she doesn't recognize the surge of emotions that thrum through her flesh. When she's angry and nearly driven to fisticuffs—she can feel her nails dig into her hand, feels the fresh sting of pain when they draw blood—and that surge of heat that spreads over her nose. She recognizes anger, and it's hot, it makes her spine tingle in a way that it doesn't when she thinks fondly of people and her mouth can't help but twitch upwards. It's just, emptier, in a sense. And people don't get that.
Jokes are trickier. Where most people just take her for having dark humour, the laughter she emits sounds bitter to her ears.
"It doesn't mean I don't remember." Karin spits out, reacting, enacting, and her fingers curl into the palm of her hand as viciousness settles cruelly in her chest. "It doesn't—it doesn't make me less."
Just like a teenage drama queen, brimming with angst and unfocused rage, she slams the door shut behind her and storms to the very top of the building, climbing onto the rooftops. How very her. In her dreams, she used to scream, shout, claw welts behind her knees; those were times when she was just a girl and all she knew was popping balloons with broken guitar strings and a field full of wheat. She sits on the cold granite floor in present day, exhales, and waits until she simmers down. Feels the breeze on her back, and watches the afternoon pass into evening.
"Sorry." Renji apologizes, and Karin doesn't look at him, even as the footsteps become loud. "You did what you had to do. I get that."
"I'm not numb." Karin says. When he reaches out to touch her shoulder she doesn't move away. "I don't regret it. But. It doesn't make it okay, you know?"
"I know. I'm sorry."
His calloused hand is warm.