Disclaimer: I do not own Bleach. If I did, Karin would be a main character. She has SO much potential.

Hello everyone! Roxi here with a new story! This one will be a drabble series for Karin and Toushirou centered around the them of "Firsts".

Enjoy!

XX

He saw her first when she was barely an infant. It was late November, and he was just shy of the ten-year mark in his captain's haori. Like every other vacation he had taken for the last nine years, he was in Karakura, looking for clues as to where his former captain and mentor had disappeared to; Karakura was his last known location. Against Matsumoto's wishes, once more, he almost literally flew through the clear fall sky, trying to sense something, anything, to reassure him that his surrogate father had not abandoned him. There was nothing.

Somehow he found himself in the park, walking on the same ground as the mortals, slipping around them more nimbly than any of their kind could have, when he saw them coming toward him. The Kurosaki family, as they had come to be known. The boy, looking barely five, was clutching his mother's hand, a beautiful auburn-haired lady with a sweet smile. The boy glanced once at him, but returned to his mother's attention almost immediately. In her unoccupied hand was a stroller handle, in which two infants stared at the golden leaves with wide eyes, neither crying, both snuggled up in baby clothes; but that's where the similarities ended: on Toushirou's left a nearly bald brown eyed girl, and opposite her sister, a pale baby with blue eyes so dark they looked black and a tuft of black hair topped on her head.

Maybe if the young captain knew he was looking at his future wife, sister-in-law and hero of the Winter War, he would've looked harder. But Fate is funny like that. As it was, Toushirou barely gave the other Kurosaki a glance, so entranced was he by Isshin—his former captain, a happy but lonely man with loyalty so fierce it was terrifying.

He watched them for maybe half an hour before he left, opening a Senkaimon in a clearing away from the humans. He looked back only one, silently bidding Captain Kurosawa farewell and making eye contact with the blue-eyed girl staring at him far too intently for an average six-month-old.

XX

Hope you like that. I'll try to update every week, possibly more.

Please review on your way out~