She was doing a terrible job. Ichigo muted the TV and considered his options.
Karin was his sister, and he loved her as completely and simply as he was willing to admit without punching himself in the face. That said, he didn't spend the better part of his high school career playing at delinquency to let a member of his family get away with such a piss poor excuse for breaking into her own house. If this was her setting off his metaphorical tripwire, his old man had felt it when Karin snuck out in the first place, and Yuzu had been keeping secrets since the two of them got home from school.
He heard her jog the lock a second time as he walked into the kitchen and stood by the doorway.
It had been seventeen months, but that didn't mean Ichigo hated being the last to know any less.
...
The stiff line of her shoulders gave in with the lock. Slowly, Karin let the air back into her lungs.
She wasn't hiding anything. If anyone asked her what she was doing out after the rest of Karakura Town shut the blinds and cut the lights, she told them. "Oh, you know, nothing special. Just the usual family business." It helped that the most high-profile Kurosaki was not the man her mom brought out of the mist one morning. It helped that he had a history of fistfights first and fainting spells second. It helped that no one could see him back when he chased shadows in the dark.
Besides, Yuzu already had all the details—indexed by subject and alphabetized because for every watery smile Yuzu's mind ticked with all the ruthless discipline of a mainframe. Karin wasn't even sure she could hide anything from Yuzu. Some odds and ends, maybe, but it was all bound to come out eventually. It happened when you knew someone as long as you knew yourself.
Her dad never asked, but if he did, Karin would give him three guesses, and the first two wouldn't count.
Ichigo—Ichigo didn't need to guess.
She slipped the bobby pin back into her hair and pushed the door open, squinting through the kitchen and into the living room. She thought that: a) her brother had shitty taste in television and b) it was taking way too long for her eyes to lock on his deadbeat strawberry head. She looked up.
"Hey, sis," Ichigo drawled. "You're out late. Forget your key?"
His fingers hooked under her collar and lifted her up, drawing the fabric taut against her collarbone. She scowled. "Hey, jackass, you want to try not choking me?"
"Funny. I have this really strong feeling you'll live."
Relative to her, Ichigo was a lot of things. Taller, faster, stronger—that didn't have to add up to better, but it did most days. She swung a fist out. Ichigo tipped his nose back and watched her knuckles sail past. He smirked, slow and easy, because to him, that's what this was. Fine. He was still wide open for the kick she leveled at his torso.
Karin tried to make the most out of the exceptions.
He dropped her, flinching. "Imp."
"Troll," she shot back, rearranging the creases in her shirt. "Are we done here?"
Ichigo didn't say anything, just stepped back and looked. It was the kind of look she got from her teachers—from her dad, too, when he thought she wouldn't notice—only heavier. His lips pressed into a thin line, gaze flickering from the ugly gash below her cargo shorts to the scrapes across her knuckles. She wanted to explain just how bad concern looked on him: it shadowed all the wrong lines in his face.
Instead, she took a deep breath. She was letting him see this. This, and not the dislocated shoulder Inoue had Ayame and Shinou pop back into place.
Karin wasn't hiding anything. If anyone asked her what she was doing, she told them. If she tried not to give them too much to ask about—well, that was something else.
Ichigo motioned to the kitchen table. "Sit."
She held her palms up and slumped into a chair. She yawned while he fumbled around the cabinet where their dad kept the clinic supplies. "That stuff's for patients, you know."
He threw a roll of tape at her.
"You missed," she said.
"It's the thought that counts," he replied, sitting across from her. He laid down a pack of gauze, a bandage roll, and a dark bottle of hydrogen peroxide. "Hands first."
She groaned.
"It's either me or—"
"Dad. I get it." She stuck out her arms. "I still hate you."
He moistened a wad of gauze and started dabbing. "Tell me that after you're not dying from gangrene."
"You've officially given up all rights to calling Dad dramatic. Like, ever."
He moved on to her leg, using one hand to clamp her ankle against his side before drowning her shin in hydrogen peroxide. "Standard of care still applies."
Their dad had already lined them up and run them through the basics of first aid, chock full with his take on the usual bullshit. "Some things have to hurt before they get better," he'd said, before snapping apart a badly set fracture. Yuzu had shuddered. Ichigo, from the way he was scrubbing at the raw skin on her leg, had been taking notes. Karin grimaced. Getting older did weird things to people.
Whatever flavor of damage he'd picked out for himself, Ichigo took his sweet time checking all the boxes in his version of the family trauma protocol. Karin had run through the stats of the men's and women's national football teams before he finally let her go and started cleaning up. She rocked her foot back and forth experimentally. Her knee stung less than before Ishida fished the Hollow venom out, but not by much.
Ichigo frowned at her. "Are there more?"
Of course there were—had been. She'd dealt with them. She hadn't dealt with him. Her fingers rapped an unsteady drum against the table. "You're not going to ask what happened?"
He leaned against the counter, rubbing his chin like she'd asked him what he thought about the weather in Kyoto. Like he couldn't see the point behind the question. "Not really." His smile was a crooked twist at the edge of his mouth. "You're not going to tell me?"
Karin blinked. She hadn't actually played through the idea that Ichigo wondered about the lessons he left behind, too. She'd decided, back when his world was the one hanging off the edges of hers, that half the truth was better than a lie. She'd never stopped to ask if he agreed. Her grin stretched tight across her cheeks. "Not really."
He walked past her, pausing at the base of the stairs before climbing up to his room. "Don't die out there, brat."
...
High school was just one big obstacle course. Ichigo's dad would tell him that he was too young (and probably some combination of the words 'adorable' and 'cherubic') to be cynical, but his dad also spent a lot of time getting thrown out of windows by his children and not having a real medical license. Which went to show, objectively, high school sucked balls. It was just another long list of things he had to do before he could see his friends and graduate and get the fuck on with his life.
Point in case: the location of Inoue Orihime. She'd always been sort of skittish around him, and she'd only gotten worse since they stopped seeing the world the same way. It's not like he could blame her. He never looked her in the eye whenever she stood up in the middle of class and excused herself.
That didn't change the fact that he needed to talk to her. Ichigo closed his locker and stared down the hall where his classmates were swarming near their homerooms. He caught himself wishing—uselessly—that he could key in on her reiatsu. Rukia would laugh. Even once upon a time, he'd never been any good at that sort of thing. Rukia had tried to teach him—well, a lot of things. Not like it did him any good now.
He'd find Inoue the same way as anyone else. He breathed in deep, like he was about to split a Hollow in two—
"Ichigo!"
—and let it out.
Keigo's grin was unnervingly wide as he looped an arm around Ichigo's shoulders. "What are your thoughts about baseball?"
"Not now, Keigo."
"Because I love baseball," Keigo forged on, "and I think it'd be the worst thing ever if our team missed the playoffs again—"
"Again? Last week you didn't know our high school had a baseball team."
"Talk about tragedy, right? I have to make up for three years' worth of apathy!"
"What's your angle?" Ichigo asked, not that he needed to. Keigo and he pretty much had the same sort of things going on in their lives—college entrance exams, part-time jobs, raging hormones—even if Keigo used a different scale to prioritize his battles.
"So, Kunieda was telling me about how their ace tore some muscles in his rotator cuff—"
Ichigo almost admired his honesty. "Kunieda, huh? No thanks."
"How can you be so cold? Here I am, your dearest friend, on my knees—on my knees, Ichigo! —" Keigo paused to clutch at his chest, "and you can't even pretend to hesitate?"
"It's not my job to get you laid," Ichigo replied, craning his neck on the off chance that Inoue picked the near future to slip into view. Lucky for him, she did. "I'll talk to you later. If I find my name on the sub list, seeing dead people is going to be the least of your worries."
He tuned out Keigo's protests and trained his eyes to where Inoue was making her way down the hall. She was humming in time to her music, one earbud twirling in her hands as the other students parted around her. Mizuiro always said there was something purposeful about the way Inoue moved through a crowd, like the rest of the world had no other go but to fall in step with her feet. Days like this, Ichigo could almost see it.
She took the other earbud out of her ear and waved brightly when she saw him. "Good morning, Kurosaki!"
Ichigo wasn't blind. He knew exactly how great it was that a girl like Inoue would give him the time of day, let alone swing over the full floodlights of her attention when he stopped her in the hall. Maybe some of that was dried blood and empty stretches of desert sand, but if Ichigo had to justify himself to anyone other than, well, himself, he'd say that Tatsuki was the nicest thing connecting the dots between Inoue and him these days.
Except, of course, for the issue of certain little sisters with massively overblown hero complexes. "Hey, Inoue. Can I talk to you?"
He watched the curve of her lips flatten, her foot shifting out—something she'd picked up from Rukia, or maybe Matsumoto. Seventeen months changed a lot, but not the way Inoue wore her armor. "You're talking to me now, aren't you?"
Ichigo tightened his grip on his bookbag. The singsong bent of her voice hadn't changed. He could work with that. "Right."
"There's something specific you want to talk about, of course. I hope it's the robot apocalypse. Tatsuki and I stayed up late watching The Matrix yesterday, you know."
"No wonder Tatsuki didn't notice when Mizuiro swapped their bentos."
"It wasn't very nice of Kojima to do it, and it wasn't very nice of you to let it happen." Her mouth lapsed into a pout. She schooled it back into the kind of expression that made Ichigo want to choose his next words wisely. "I think I'm out of luck, though. So, Kurosaki, what is this not-the-robot-apocalypse-thing you want to talk to me about?"
Ichigo tried to find a place on Inoue's face that wasn't her eyes. "It's Karin."
The shock worked its way up to her hand, reflexively bunched at the edge of her skirt, before she caught it and snuffed it out. "Is she alright?"
"You tell me."
Her eyes widened. "Kurosaki—"
Maybe she was right to have her guard up. His words had come out uneven. He could still taste their ridges between his teeth. He sighed, trying to grind the sharpness out of his voice. This was still Inoue. He knew her. For better or for worse. "Look, I get it. There's nothing I can—it's out of my hands."
"Don't say that," she said, something sad and heavy pulling her stare to the floor. It wasn't a protest. He liked her more for that. Neither of them had ever been any good at pretending.
"I can't do what I used to." He didn't expect it to sound so final, but he owed Karin that much. "I get that. Just—she's my sister, and she doesn't know when to be afraid. I need to know if she's in over her head. You'd tell me, wouldn't you?"
She was quiet for a long time. Ichigo could've sworn he stood there for hours, watching the beginnings of different sentences die on her lips. It reminded him of catching his parents' arguments from behind the stairs, the kitchen light throwing angry shadows against the floor. He waited. He was getting better at that.
"Ishida is training her," she told him, finally. "Urahara, too. Sado and I help out when we can. We told her we could take care of things. She wouldn't hear it." She tucked her bangs behind her ear, waiting for his reaction. "But I think you understand that part the best, don't you?"
Ichigo filled in the lines she set out. Ishida was training Karin. It wasn't like him. Or maybe it was. Ichigo appreciated jack shit about Karin's powers beyond the fact that she had them, and Ishida had a way of looking out for his own. Urahara had told him once that there was a pendulum between Shiba Isshin and Kurosaki Masaki, and each of their children was a different point along the length of its swing. If Karin took after their mom, it shouldn't be a surprise.
It shouldn't be anything, as far as he was concerned.
Inoue leaned forward into his line of view. "Kurosaki?"
"Sorry, got lost there for a sec," he apologized, running a hand over his face. "Thanks for patching her up, by the way. She barely had a scratch on her by the time she got home."
"Oh, so she decided to tell you after all!" Inoue beamed.
Ichigo grinned. "Nope. But you just did."
"Kurosaki!" she huffed, pout blooming back in full force. "You shouldn't mislead people like that! You'll get migraines!"
"How about something honest, then?" Ichigo smiled, a real one this time. "Thanks, Inoue. It means—just—thanks."
Like everything else, Inoue folded the words into her orbit. "There's nothing to say thank you for, Kurosaki."
Her reply was an anchor to Hueco Mundo, weighted with the sound of her voice screaming his name, the give of his fist scissoring through the space where a heart should be. There were layers—you can talk to me, and, I'm sorry, and please don't worry—but Ichigo wasn't about to unpack all of that before his calculus test first period. "The Hollows are getting stronger, aren't they?"
Inoue tipped her head to the side. "Karin hasn't told you?"
"Not a word," Ichigo shrugged. "She's just a bad liar."
Inoue laughed, a rush of air hushed against the heel of her hand. "You weren't much better, Kurosaki."
...
Of course Yuzu had her report ready. The day Yuzu turned in an assignment late, the principal would probably send one of the students out to check if the sun was still shining.
"Kurosaki Yuzu," their teacher announced, "I look forward to reading another excellent essay. If only your sister could learn from your example."
Yuzu offered Karin an apologetic wince on her way back to her seat. Karin rolled her eyes. The next time a Hollow tried to bite her teacher's head off, she'd grab some pocky and watch it happen—even if she could already hear the lecture Ishida would proceed to slingshot her way.
"A soul consumed by a Hollow won't return," her mental version of him scolded, sounding way too pious for someone who was still a teenager. "Forget your differences for the greater good."
Well, the greater good was currently failing her out of Feudal Japanese, so they weren't entirely on speaking terms. Not everyone could be Kurosaki Ichigo, full-time honors student, part-time Shinigami. It wasn't healthy. The universe just happened to stuff her between two perfect children. This afternoon was one out of a shit ton of calling cards.
The end-of-day bell rang, and Karin almost missed their teacher's sendoff as she elbowed into the mob of students bolting for the door. "Kurosaki Karin, I'll expect your report on my desk first thing Monday morning."
To her credit, Karin managed to wait till she was three full doors down before she let loose. "That motherfucking sadist! Why couldn't she have just failed me like a normal person?"
Yuzu bumped shoulders with her in the hall. "Most people would be happy to get a second chance, you know."
"Yeah? Well most people don't have—"
"Boot camp this weekend?" There were a lot of things about Jinta that Karin didn't understand: why he gelled his hair back like a washed-up gangster, why he picked Urahara over Tessai for parent-teacher conferences, why he thought he could hide the way his eyes got all soft when they landed on Yuzu—oh, gross. It was happening right now. "Hey, Yuzu."
"Hey, Jinta!" Yuzu greeted, throwing up a peace sign and simultaneously outing herself as the true heir to their dad's misconceptions about normal human interaction. "Don't keep Karin too long, okay? She's got to make up a report this weekend."
"Oh, yeah?" Jinta squinted pointedly at Yuzu's shoes. "I'll, uh, see what I can work out with the old man."
"You will? You're the best, Jinta!" Yuzu turned to Karin, perfectly blind to the blush radiating across Jinta's cheeks. "That means no excuses for missing dinner, Karin."
Karin wished she could teleport both of them into the sun. "Roger that."
Yuzu saluted. "See you tonight, Karin! Later, Jinta!"
To his credit, Jinta only wasted a few seconds gawking after Yuzu before nodding to the exit. "Ururu's outside. You ready?"
Karin tapped her cheek. Jinta lost points for falling disgustingly head-over-heels for her sister, but he also owned bragging rights to the meanest corner kick in Karakura. Better to pay it forward. "Lead the way, " she said.
...
Unlike Inoue, Chad was an easy find. He was sprawled out on the school roof, somehow more solid than the whole building and the earth below it.
"School got out, like, two hours ago," Ichigo said, shutting the door to the stairwell behind him.
"That so?" Chad didn't look back when he replied, eyes stuck on whatever the fuck was above them. Ichigo hoped it wasn't a Hollow.
"Must be one hell of a sunset."
"Why don't you find out yourself?"
He lay back next to Chad, stretching his neck until the only thing he could see were cloudless blues and washed-out reds. Karakura didn't have much, but it knew how to make night fall like nowhere else. "I hate it when you're right."
"I'm always right."
"Everyone who thinks you're nice is tripping balls. You're such an ass."
Ichigo felt more than heard Chad's laugh, a deep rumble that shook Chad's shoulders and settled easily under Ichigo's skin. He couldn't remember when he started waiting for the brace of Chad's back against his own in a fight, and—well. It had never been hard with Chad—even after everything else was.
"I talked to Inoue today," he said.
"You're still worried."
Ichigo managed to block out a lot of things about his life since half the world clocked out of it, but this part was certified, irredeemable bullshit: the part where he hung back and annotated Macbeth while his little sister and his best friends came this short of killing themselves trying to keep him safe. He hadn't really figured out how to just stand there and believe in someone else. He wasn't sure he wanted to. "Karin hasn't come home hurt before," he replied.
"I'm sorry." The trick to talking to Chad was to listen for the half of the conversation he was having with himself. Chad's nails cut dull crescents into his palms, like the first time Ichigo found him tied to a chair, black-eyed and bloody and quoting his grandfather. Ichigo remembered thinking that Chad had a weakness for unreasonable promises.
"I don't blame you. You know that." Ichigo sighed, blowing the air though his nose. "Karin got into enough trouble before she started chasing ghosts out of trees."
"Something is pushing the Hollows out of Hueco Mundo," Chad said, considering and setting aside Ichigo's reprieve as easily as if Ichigo had brought him a pair of shoes that didn't fit. It'd be endearing if it wasn't so aggravating. "Urahara has his theories."
Ichigo scoffed. "I bet he's told you all about them."
Chad was halfway through a shrug when every line in his body filed into focus. He was on his feet in the time it took Ichigo's stomach to drop through the floor. Ichigo scrambled after him, the sound of his voice drowned out under the thudding in his ears. "Is it Karin?"
Chad held up a hand and stalked to the edge of the roof, glaring at the empty expanse of the horizon—at something Ichigo couldn't see at all.
...
Karin really didn't like sparring with Ururu. Not in an irrational, gut-deep way. A practical one. Jinta was the easier fight. His kanabou had a tendency to send her flying, but at least he stomped around the training ground at a pace her eyes could follow. Ururu blurred to the other side of the field, far enough out of arm's reach that Karin indulged herself in the heady luxury of trying to come up with a game plan. That is, until Ururu started pelting her with cannon fire.
"Oh, fuck," Karin said.
"Now might be a good time to try using Hirenkyaku," Ishida called out.
"Too bad you can't ditch that pesky body and shunpo to safety," Urahara crowed.
Regardless of whether she sparred with Jinta or Ururu, that freed up Urahara and Ishida to backseat drive the hell out of her heartfelt efforts not to get blown up. She scowled at where they stood in a moving demonstration of her total lack of appreciation.
"Increasing power level to thirty percent. Target locked," Ururu declared, planting her feet wide and hoisting her Thousand Soul-Killing Cannon over her shoulder.
Karin tried to ignore the chill that ran down her spine. It was hard to think of Ururu as anything other than not human when she started listing her stats in percentages.
"It's fine if you don't feel comfortable using Hirenkyaku yet. The most important thing right now is for you to get out of the way," Ishida said.
"Our dear Ururu is so fast though," Urahara tutted from behind his fan. "If only you knew some way to craft a barrier."
Karin bit her lip. Tessai had taught her the basics of kidou earlier in the week—funneling her reiatsu outside her body, curling it into bizarre shapes and loops. His homework consisted of memorizing a few simple incantations with the explicit caveat of not taking them out for a test drive before his next session. Well, Karin mused, savoring the crackle of gathering power beneath her skin, better to go out swinging. "Bakudou Number Eight: Repulse!" she shouted
"Firing," Ururu intoned, unleashing an orange storm of rocket missiles that whipped her hair back and flung cold light into her eyes.
Karin's reiatsu flickered into a translucent sheet, and she swallowed the laughter burbling at the back of her throat. She was hiding behind a glorified pane of glass. When the artillery hit, she already had her arms up to shield herself from the blowback. It didn't help. She came to wondering 1) what throwing out your back felt like and 2) if she'd managed to do it.
"Fuck. Kidou," she concluded after some deliberation.
Ishida's head loomed into view. "You know, Ichigo was terrible at kidou too."
Karin wanted to scream. Seventeen months ago, she'd thought of Ishida as that one friend of Ichigo's with a penchant for embroidery and a stick up his ass. Now, she thought of Ishida as that one friend of Ichigo's with a penchant for draconian training regimens and a habit of frowning like he wasn't sure if he should yell at her or the sky-high expectations her brother left behind. Which was all a nice way of saying that the stick had somehow migrated further up his ass.
"I could train you in the more hands-on Shinigami arts," Urahara interjected, crowding her as Ishida helped her to her feet, "But first we'd have to, ah, snip-snip your soul chain—"
"Because that worked so well with Ichigo."
"My, my, dear Ishida," Urahara said, dusting imaginary specks of dust from Karin's hair. "If I didn't know any better, I'd say you had a grudge."
Ishida's laugh was knife-edged and humorless. "You act like it's some kind of secret."
The air went thick with reiatsu, stuck to the roof Karin's mouth no matter how hard her chest heaved. Urahara was stronger—she knew that with the absolute certainty that she reserved for things like Yuzu's birthday and Kunishige Kamamoto's career score count—but Ishida was angrier. Her gaze darted across the arena. Ururu had re-leveled the barrel of her cannon: one eye shut, one finger on the trigger.
"You gave his Hollow a path to the outside world."
"Kurosaki Ichigo had a Hollow well before he became interested in playing Shinigami. Or did you honestly think his prodigious reiatsu was some happy accident?" Urahara asked, stepping away from Karin and peering at Ishida under the rim of his hat.
"Inoue almost died. And Ichigo—"
"Ichigo is alive, as is the rest of Karakura Town."
"Even children know how to clean up after themselves," Ishida spat, staggering on the edge of a shout. "Don't congratulate yourself."
No one had ever explained to Karin why Ichigo had come home one day and started walking through dead people like everyone else. She'd lost count of the number of people who had promised to reel out the whole story-always one day, soon, when she could take it. Yuzu lost a lot of sleep over how fucked up it was that Karin had to earn the right to hear the truth. That no one, not even Ichigo, would just tell her.
Yuzu was also a big proponent of picking your battles, and even if Urahara and Ishida tore out each other's throats, they weren't about to pull the curtain on who Karin had to make pay for wrenching the fire out of her brother. Plus, Tessai would probably appreciate the lack of property damage.
"Well, if you guys are fighting, that means it's time for me to go," she announced loudly. "I'll stop by again tomorrow."
Ishida and Urahara broke from each other to stare down at her. Karin didn't have to wonder if her next breath would come easy. Neither of them would intentionally choke her to death. They had just forgotten she was there. That was sort of the theme with Ichigo.
"Of course," Ishida nodded.
"I'll be waiting for you bright and early!" Urahara hummed, patting her head.
Karin batted his arm away, found her backpack, and trekked up to the shop's exit. Tessai met her at the door with a wrapped bento. "I apologize for our rudeness," he said, bowing deeply. "It seems there is bad blood between us yet."
Karin smiled despite herself. "It's fine, Tessai."
"Take the bento, at least. We've kept you well into the evening, and it would hardly do if you starved to death."
"I know I complain about her a lot, but Yuzu's not a monster. She'll make sure I eat."
"Something to snack on, then," Tessai insisted. "These exercises take their toll, and I want you at your best when I show you what went wrong with the kidou spell you attempted today."
"Right," Karin cringed, the crash and burn of her jerry-rigged barrier flashing before her eyes. She shook her head and grabbed the bento. "Till tomorrow, then, old man."
Karin wasn't being careless when she assumed the walk home would be a quiet one. Hollows generally steered clear of the Urahara Shop. Whether that was due to self-preservation or something more deliberate was anyone's guess. Hollows didn't exactly give out interviews. Still, Ishida would kill her if she let her guard down completely. She compromised by picking up her pace as she peeked inside the contents of Tessai's bento box. It was just her luck that she was in the middle of decoding his sushi mosaic when reality cracked.
An oil black gulf stretched the sky, cutting jagged seams with edges rolled up like parchment into the clouds. Dimly, Karin realized she had her Quincy Cross in hand. Figures she'd bite the dust right when all her hard work was starting to pay off. There were only a few things that could create a path out of the afterlife, and none of them were even remotely in her weight class. She didn't have any illusions about what to do next (she wasn't strong enough to be impractical, and that, more than anything else was what Yoruichi said would keep her alive). She would run. She'd get a read on what was so dead set on gnashing her into little pieces, and then she'd run with everything she had.
The shriek of torn sheet metal clawed through the breeze. Karin covered her ears and looked.
Kuchiki Rukia stepped across the hole she'd punched in the world. A grin split her face, like fissures through an ice floe. "Prepare to die, child."