Disclaimer: Eh. You know I don't own it.

The Three-Body Problem

A Bleach Fanfic

Chapter Eight: April

Karin was pretty sure Yuzu's face hadn't lost the red for the entirety of the evening so far.

It really didn't help that their father was telling everyone and anyone who would listen for even half a second that his amazing and wonderful Yuzu-chan had achieved shikai after only seven months at Shin'ō, and that was a new record, didn't you know?

Equally painful-slash-hilarious was the fact that Yuzu tried to stop him from talking about it every time. They were out in the third district for dinner, so more than a few of the faces were familiar. Karin knew her twin well enough to know that public scrutiny was a nightmare for Yuzu in more than one way. But… it was pretty much impossible not to get it when the geezer was making such a huge deal out of the whole thing.

Karin tipped back her celebratory sake, casually plucking another dumpling from the plate in the center of the table with her chopsticks. It wasn't good manners, but it wasn't like her family cared. Even Uryū didn't so much as blink.

The waitress—an extremely patient woman named Fumiko who often served them here—walked by, and the old man flagged her down and launched back into his pride speech. Yuzu tugged at his sleeve in an attempt to get him to stop, but it was completely useless.

"Does it bother you?" Uryū's question was quiet, but since he was next to her on her side of the table, he didn't have to be any louder to make himself heard.

She shrugged. "I mean, he's annoying, but it's probably bothering Yuzu more than me." She popped the dumpling into her mouth and chewed, leaning forward to pick a few more things off the large plates in the middle.

"That's not what I meant," he said.

Karin swallowed her mouthful and leaned back again. "I know."

The truth was… she wasn't exactly sure. Swiping her tongue over her teeth, she elaborated. "I'm happy for her. I am. She worked hard, and she deserves it. But…"

"But you've worked hard, too." He refilled both their sake cups and handed hers to her without asking.

She knocked it back in a swallow, chasing the dumplings with the sharp rice wine. "Yeah. I thought… I dunno what I thought. That one of us would do it first. Yuzu just… she's different, now, from how she used to be, but kind of not. It's…" She waved the empty sake dish in no particular direction, trying to articulate something her words couldn't quite explain.

"It's not bad, but it makes you wonder about things."

She nodded. "She's been there all my life, you know. But I've always been the one who…" Karin trailed off.

From the way he nodded, she didn't have to explain any further than that, anyway. She supposed that was the good thing about having friends.

"All right, everyone back to the front."

Karin lined up between Uryū and Yuzu, Sugitani on her sister's other side. The polar opposite end of the line had Fujita, Moribito, and then Nishimura on it, and the other three floated in the middle. Karin hadn't really paid much attention before, but now that she thought about it… pretty much every class looked like that.

"So today we're going to start practicing with a new form. It's not useful for everyone, especially if you have a big shikai, but it can help with sealed swordfighting at least." Renji rubbed at the back of his neck, fluffing his weird topknot-ponytail thing.

He swore up and down that the color was natural. Karin wasn't so sure about that.

"Anyway," he continued, glancing down the line. "Anyone here know any iaijutsu?"

Nishimura raised his hand.

"Oh, good. We can demonstrate then." Renji beckoned Nishimura forward. "So Nishimura here is going to try and attack me, like usual." He picked up what looked like a real sword of some kind from the ground and handed it to the other man, who accepted with a bow.

"What we're using here are iaitō, which are just blunted blades. Since the zanjutsu we do here isn't focused on any one discipline in particular, you'll be learning a mix of forms. Some of them are true iaijutsu, some of them are adapted from older battōjutsu practices, and some of them are iaidō, though that stuff's mostly for meditation and not battle, so only a few of the kata are all that useful to us."

Removing Zabimaru from his sash, Renji slid in another iaitō, resting his hand on the sheath just below the tsuba and tilting it slightly forward and down, so the blade was closer to horizontal. "There are two basic stances for iaijutsu forms. There's the crouching posture, called iai-goshi, and the standing one, tachi-ai. Iaidō has a sitting one, too, or you can start from seiza, but mobility from either of them is really bad, so you'll only be learning the quickest way to get up and actually fight from those."

Renji crouched low, almost in seiza, but kept the balls of his feet and toes flat on the ground underneath him, one leg slightly forward compared to the other. Karin thought she could see the mechanics of it already, the way he could spring up quickly, and had enough mobility to turn with the standing motion if he had to.

With a nod, he signaled for Nishimura to attack him. Karin's classmate chose a straightforward downward arc, quick and effective, swift enough to part the air in front of it with a dull whistle. Renji's hand was on the hilt of his sword faster than Karin could track, though, and the iaitō rasped free of its sheath with a slight ring. Renji brought it up to block effortlessly, catching Nishimura's blade with a hard impact before it could complete its trajectory; Nishimura's grip faltered.

The follow-up was easy: Renji added the strength of his legs and other arm, bracing the back of the blade on his free palm and standing with the momentum of his draw. It forced Nishimura's hands up above his head; Renji disengaged and swung in to score a quick rap on his wide-open ribcage. In the same smooth sequence, the vice-captain flourished his blade in a sharp outward motion, then slid it smoothly back home into the sheath.

"What was that extra part for?" Karin asked, not bothering to raise her hand. She knew Renji didn't give a shit about that kind of thing.

"It's meant to get the blood off the sword," he replied, crossing his arms over his chest. "Not a concern here, but trust me when I say you don't want to sheathe a bloody zanpakutō. Makes cleaning it a chore, and your spirit'll probably hate you for a while."

Oh. Well, there went her chance to rib him for showing off. Still… that had been really cool.

"Is it always defensive like that, or can you initiate with it as well?" That question came from Tojo.

"Well, it was designed for response to sudden attacks, but there's no reason you can't initiate with it, if you're good enough. The really expert practitioners learn how to use the momentum from the draw to hit a little bit faster than they would otherwise, but for most people it's actually slower. You probably don't want to try unless you're committed to it as part of your style."

After a few more questions, Renji demonstrated several more of the crouching katas, and pretty soon they were all down in the iai-goshi, trying to maintain their balance and focus at the same time. It was hardest on the bigger guys like Tojo and Matsuda, but they were all so used to the conditioning by now that aside from the occasional wobble, it was just a matter of making it feel natural, automatic.

"Nice block, Kurosaki," Renji said as she swatted aside Nishimura's strike.

Karin grinned, bending her knees for the next one.

"Hey, so, uhh…" Abe rocked back on his heels, hands folded into the sleeves of his academy uniform. "Hotaru says you guys train here a lot. I could stand to be a little better at Hohō myself. Might be able to teach a couple of you some stuff I know about kidō in exchange?" He shrugged, his mouth pulling up to one side.

He didn't quite seem to be able to smile all the way on the left, where the scar was, so it kept him looking a bit lopsided, not quite sloppy, but… askew. That was the fancy word.

Karin frowned skeptically. "What do you know about kidō that Yuzu doesn't?" She jerked a thumb at her sister, currently attempting to shunpō with some help from Uryū.

Of course, he was only sporadically successful himself, so they weren't getting too far.

"Well, the kind that makes it out into the far districts doesn't look a lot like this proper academy stuff, I'll grant ya. But some of the ones we end up with are a little better in the right situations." He rubbed at the stubble growing in over his jaw.

"Eh. Fine. I'm about to try and teach these dunderheads how to flash-step, so you can join." She paused. "Who the hell is Hotaru, anyway?"

He arched both brows. "Hotaru Sugitani. That guy." He pointed at their fourth with his chin.

"Huh. Didn't know that was his name."

"Well everyone's so damn stuffy around here it doesn't surprise me. Never had so many people call me 'Abe' in my life." He dropped his arms loosely, then stretched one across his chest, in preparation for physical activity.

Karin snorted. "What do you go by, then?"

"Mostly? 'Hey you' or 'old guy.' Shinjirō's my actual name, though." He switched arms.

She considered him. He looked barely younger than her dad, but that wasn't that old. "Meet you halfway. Shinjirō-jii."

He laughed, the sound dangerously close to a cackle. "I was asking for that, I think."

"As long as you know it."

"You seemed to enjoy iaijustu again today."

Karin had landed in her inner world in a slightly different place this time. Though really they were all kind of the same. Only the contours of the pockmarked landscape changed much at all. Well, and the shape of the clouds drifting by overhead, technically.

She wondered if that was true of the whole thing. Couldn't hurt to walk around, could it? So she took several steps forward, pausing to wait and see if the spirit would follow her.

It did, gracefully placing its cranelike legs so as to avoid any loose pieces of ground, its tail trailing behind it in three long feather-strands.

"I dunno," she replied with a shrug. "I like it. It feels right somehow. Zanjutsu in general is fun."

The bird made a humming noise, and for a time, they walked in silence.

It was Karin who broke it. "You want me to talk about Yuzu, don't you?"

"I want you to talk about whatever is going to help you progress," it replied simply.

"I'm jealous." The words came out in a single gust of air, and something about them was easier, in here, easier even than it had been with Uryū. Maybe because she was talking to herself, instead of someone else.

"Of?"

She frowned, sucking in another breath and releasing it heavily. "Well, shikai, obviously. I really wanted to get it first. I've only got a couple more days until that Tōshirō guy's record, too." The thought didn't sit well with her, particularly after she'd actually met him. He was kind of a jerk.

"Another obstacle to tear down?"

Karin clicked her tongue against her teeth. "Yes? No. I'm not sure." Yuzu wasn't an obstacle. She never stood in anyone's way, let alone Karin's. If anything, she needed to do that more often. The record thing… she'd set that up like an obstacle. One that it looked like she was never going to be able to get past in time. She didn't feel any closer to shikai than she'd been on the day she found her spirit.

"It's just… I was the one that was always good at this kind of thing, you know?" Karin grimaced, folding her hands together behind her head. "I was the one who did the athletic stuff, and I kind of figured I'd be the one doing the dangerous stuff, too. I'm way more aggressive than she is."

She knew, now, that aggression and athleticism alone did not make fighting. Obviously, kidō required more than that, but so did other things, like hakuda and even zanjutsu. Some of it, Karin thought she was picking up. Some of it, though… some of it still felt really far away.

A glance up at the sky presented her with more moving clouds, thick and low-hanging thunderheads, but not a drop of rain. Go figure.

"You don't think you could be good at other things?"

She pushed out a short bark of laughter. "Like what? I'm crap at anything artistic or domestic."

"So you chose this path because it was the only option, for you."

Karin's footsteps drew to a halt. Had that been the reason? She chose it because she couldn't see herself succeeding at anything else? She'd thought her reasons were better than that, more noble, in a sense, but what if that was really all it boiled down to?

"I'm not sure," she said, chewing on the words before she let them back out again. "I don't think that was the reason. Or not the only reason."

"Then why?"

"Hm." She picked her feet up again and resumed walking. That pit in the landscape looked awfully familiar. Was it a repeating pattern? "I wanted… I want to be useful, somehow." Come to think of it, that reason didn't sound all that noble either.

"After… after mom and Ichigo died, dad kinda fell to pieces, you know? He wasn't functional for a while, and even when he was, he ran out of energy really quick. It was…" She swallowed. "It was almost like we lost him, too, for a while there. Yuzu—Yuzu picked up the pieces and started putting them back together again. She did everything: cooked, cleaned, washed the laundry, boxed up mom and Ichigo's things. Made sure the lights stayed on and the water kept running. Rescheduled clinic patients around dad's bad days."

Karin shook her head. She could feel a knot pressing in on her chest, just under her heart. "And me… I couldn't do any of that. The best I could do was not make things harder for them. I swore off crying, swore off being a burden, and just… existed." One of her most vivid memories left from the living world was holding Yuzu in her arms a year after the whole thing. Her sister had bawled and sobbed into her shoulder, but Karin couldn't do it. She'd just sat there, feeling like someone had taken a shovel to her guts and scooped everything out, leaving raw pain around the very edges but nothing inside.

"This was supposed to be the way I could… make up for that. For all the times I hadn't helped her. She worked so hard for us, and all I could do was make sure not to cry. It's not a fair trade, is it?"

She felt a spike in temperature as the bird wandered closer, walking now right beside her. Its head reached about halfway up her bicep, mostly due to its neck and legs.

"And you feel that even this, she can do without you."

"Tch. Sounds pretty awful when you put it like that." That didn't make it untrue, though. "It's just… if Yuzu can do all these things by herself… who needs me at all? Aren't I just the extra twin?"

"Have you asked her how she feels?"

Karin looked at her feet, dropping her arms from their spot behind her head. "No. We don't talk much about… then." Sometimes, Karin thought about it, only to realize that a few more memories were blurrier than she thought they should be. She'd never forget her mom and her brother, she knew, but she did wonder if sometime in the future, she'd only have a vague sense of what they'd been like. She didn't know how to feel about it.

"Perhaps you should."

"Yeah… maybe."

"…Yuzu?"

Her sister looked up from the essay she was writing, meeting Karin's eyes and blinking. "Hm?"

Karin pulled in a breath. Their room smelled like a strange combination of the bamboo plant growing on the desk, laundry detergent, the air from outside, and citrus, probably from cleaner. "Do you, uh… have a minute?"

She set her own books aside, closing her kidō theory textbook over on the notebook she was writing in. Yuzu, though wearing a slightly perplexed expression, nodded and did the same, arranging her things into a neat stack on her desk.

"What is it, Karin?"

She frowned, searching for the words. It was one thing to know she should talk to her sister about this—it was another thing all together to be able to do it. "I wanted… to say I'm sorry."

Yuzu pulled her legs up underneath her on her chair, folding her hands loosely into her lap. "For what? If this is because you ate my cookies again, it's really not—"

"Er—no." Karin shook her head, leaning back against the wall. She crossed her feet at the ankles on the bed, then uncrossed them again when it was uncomfortable. "I'm sorry about… about how I was after… mom and Ichigo."

She turned her head to the side, but from the corner of her eye, she could see Yuzu stiffen, then relax, muscle by muscle. Her mouth dropped at the corners, though, and remained that way.

"What do you mean?"

The end of Karin's bed, where all her covers were pushed back into a messy pile, blurred slightly in her vision. "I didn't help you. I told myself it was because I didn't know how, but there were things I could have done. Answered phones, or cleaned, or anything like that. I just…"

Yuzu stood up, moving over to Karin's bed, sitting on the edge before bracing both arms on the mattress and using them to push herself back, so she was sitting right next to her sister. Their hips, legs, and shoulders made solid contact when Yuzu leaned slightly to the left.

"You took it really hard, Karin. We all did. I dealt with it in my way, and you dealt with it in yours. You don't have to be sorry for that."

Karin looked down at her hands in her lap. "Yeah, but… you took care of me, Yuzu. I leaned on you, because I was afraid to lean on dad. I didn't want to be a burden—that was the one thing I promised myself. But really, I was. We were both burdens on you." She could see that now. Not getting upset, not crying, not bringing things up or accidentally triggering memories… none of that meant she wasn't a burden. She had barely been a functioning human being.

"No you weren't." Yuzu's voice wobbled. "Karin… you and dad were the only reason I could do anything back then. Sometimes… some mornings, I would lay there in bed and just want to cry or… or sleep forever. I didn't… I didn't know how I could possibly get up and do anything." She took in a shuddering breath, pulling her lower lip between her teeth.

Karin looked away. She'd never been good with this.

"But you know what I told myself? I said 'if I don't get up now, then who will make lunch for Karin? Who will take dad's appointments?' I wanted… I wanted so badly to be as strong as you were being, but I wasn't. I'm not. So… I tried to take care of the little things, for both of you." There was a rustle as Yuzu dabbed at her eyes with her sleeves.

"You really thought…? Yuzu, if it wasn't for you, we'd have fallen apart and never put ourselves back together." Karin slung an arm over her sister's shoulder, tucking Yuzu into her side.

Yuzu slid one of her own arms between Karin's back and the wall and the other over her abdomen. "And you held me together," she said softly. "Just like this." With a tiny sniffle, she straightened partway and met Karin's eyes. "It's not about burdens, Karin. We just had to rely on each other. That's what family does."

Karin propped her chin on Yuzu's head, the tension ebbing from her frame as she exhaled. "Yeah."

"All right. That's it for today, everyone. Let's get organized for Jinzen." Renji waved a hand and the cool-downs ceased immediately.

"Kurosaki." Karin glanced up, to find that Nishimura was holding a hand out, palm up, towards her. "I'll take your bokken back."

She cocked her head at him, suspicious for half a second, but then flipped it over in her grip and handed it to him hilt-first. It wasn't like there was anything he could do with it—they just put them on racks to one side of the dojo. He nodded, turning to take care of them. Karin, meanwhile, found her usual spot for meditation.

She'd been trying not to think about it, but today was the day. The deadline for her challenge. She knew it wasn't really that important, but even recognizing that, part of her still wanted it. Still wanted to know that she could get past this obstacle in the time frame she'd set herself.

Settling into a cross-legged posture, she removed her zanpakutō from the sash at her waist and laid it over her knees. Rubbing a thumb over a spot of some kind on the copper-colored, octagonal tsuba, she wiped it away and straightened her posture. Letting her eyes fall shut, Karin entered her inner world.

The bird was standing at the edge of one of the pockmarks in the landscape, looking down into it with a tilted head.

"What are you doing?" Karin asked, moving to stand beside it and crossing her arms. The crater looked the same as it always did—too dark to see the bottom, roughly circular, and that was about it.

The bird lifted its head, humming quietly. "Waiting for you."

"Well… I'm here now."

"So I see." Taking a step back from the crater, the bird fluffed its feathers. "And you spoke with your sister."

"…Yeah. I really should have a long time ago."

"Did you learn anything?"

She considered it. "I think… I think we were both just doing the best we could. She doesn't want me to blame myself for not being any help back then." Karin had found it surprising that Yuzu saw those days so differently. It seemed that, close as they were, there were still things they didn't know about each other. Not just the new things, either.

"Do you?"

"Mm…" She rocked back onto her heels, tipping her upper body forward slightly to compensate. Not that it would hurt here if she fell—the ground was too spongy. "I'm not sure. I want… I want to be able to forgive myself, but… in some ways it feels like I haven't been able to change since then, you know?"

She sighed. "Yuzu adapts. She changes, learns new things. She grows, and because of that, I didn't really have to do anything much. And now… I'm not sure I know how. You keep talking about how I set my problems up like obstacles, but that's just what I've always done. It's the way I know how to be, and I'm not sure I can learn some other way."

"And so, when you feel trapped, you try to break through a new wall, is that right?"

Karin nodded. "Yeah. That works for me, most of the time. But what happened to mom and Ichigo… that's not a wall. I couldn't just… smash through my feelings. So I was useless for more than a whole year. I don't want to be like that anymore." She chewed on the inside of her lip.

"Even when I wanted to do this, to come here… I asked Yuzu to take the exams with me because I was scared of doing it alone. I've never been alone, my whole life, not in anything. And I don't really want to be, but… I want to know that I could be, if I had to."

"And in order to do that…" the bird prompted.

"In order to do that, I need to learn more than one way to solve my problems," Karin said with a sigh. "I don't have to be my sister, which is good, because I couldn't, any more than she could be me. But I have to… unstick myself. To go in a new direction, especially when the normal one isn't working."

If birds could smile, she thought this one might be. "You need to learn to go up, as well as forward," it said.

Karin's brows knit together over her eyes. "Yeah, I guess you could look at it that way." She sighed. "Anyway, I think Jinzen's probably about over for today, so I guess I'll talk to you next time." Karin shut her eyes, preparing to leave her inner world, but just before she faded out, she felt a weight on her shoulder.

Startled, she opened her eyes again, taking a half-step to the side. The bird, large as it was, balanced easily in place even when she moved, its face close enough to hers that she had to cross her eyes to see it.

"You certainly still need to work on your patience," it chided, but there was amusement in its voice. "But perhaps that is one of those things that will come in time. For now, wouldn't you like to know my name?"

She blinked her eyes open, back in the dojo where she'd begun, only…

"Hey, Abarai."

He frowned at her. "You could at least try to remember to call me sensei." He rolled his eyes when she didn't correct herself. "What, Kurosaki?"

"What do we do when we think we've got shikai?"

Suddenly, all the attention in the room was fixed on her, but Karin couldn't have cared less if she tried. She only cared about the answer to her question, at this moment.

"Uhh…" Renji trailed off, apparently unprepared for such a blunt query. "Come here and stand in the middle. Everyone else, move back." He waved his hands in a general shooing motion.

The others took up spots against the wall; Karin could see Yuzu whispering excitedly to Uryū. She flashed them both a grin. They smiled back, and she felt something warm in her chest. She could do this. She could unstick herself and move.

"Whenever you're ready," Renji said.

Karin nodded, placing a hand on the hilt of her katana.

"Sobiero, Hisaku!"

She drew the blade from tachi-ai, and the result was not quite what she'd expected. Her arc motion was controlled and careful, but on the draw, the sword sparked, flinging an arc of flame outwards. She heard a low curse from behind her, and then Zabimaru interceded over her shoulder, twisting to block the red fire before it could hit the walls of the dojo.

The hilt of Hisaku still felt warm in her hand, and she looked down at it. The blade itself was still a katana, but the blunt side was now black, the cutting edge still the same bright steel. From the very end of the hilt dangled a glimmering, red-and-gold feather, about as long as her hand from wrist to fingertip. It was tied to the kashira with a short length of braided thread.

Karin huffed a short laugh. She understood now. She wasn't supposed to go only forward.

She was meant to rise.

Term Dictionary:

Iaijutsu – 居合術 – This one's hard. The kanji are literally "to be/reside" "to join/fit" and "art." I think this is meant to refer to the fact that the sword exists or resides in the sheath, and fits back in or rejoins it after the draw. In any case, iaijutsu is a particular sword art which revolves around quickly drawing the blade from the sheath (usually in response to an attack, though as Renji points out, you can initiate a fight with it), performing a certain sequence of maneuvers, and then returning it to the sheath. The last move before the return is usually meant to cast blood off the blade for a clean return. Battōjutsu (抜刀術) is an old term for iaijutsu, and so in Soul Society at least, some of the older forms of the art are still called that. Iaidō (居合道) is a similar but not identical practice. The main difference is that the emphasis in iaijutsu is on battle-readiness, and so for example none of the moves start from a fully-seated position, because who the hell is going to be sitting in the middle of a battle? Plus sitting or being in seiza really restricts a fighter's mobility and capacity to fend off attackers from other directions. Iaidō also has a spiritual/mental component that iaijutsu lacks.

-jii – 祖父 – "Old man." Most commonly seen in "ojiisan," which is the Japanese word for grandfather. Like many 'family' words, however, it can also be applied to other people of the right age and gender, and jii can be used by itself as an honorific, of a sort. Here, Karin is basically calling Abe "old man Shinjirō" or "gramps," a reference to the fact that he is/looks considerably older than the rest of the students (though he doesn't actually appear elderly). Kyōraku refers to Yamamoto as "Yama-jii," which has a similar informal connotation.

Kashira – 頭 – "Head." The pommel of a katana. I also use the word tsuba (鍔) a lot; that's the hand guard or crossguard in western parlance. The hilt is properly called the tsuka (柄).

Hisaku – 緋鷟 – "Scarlet Phoenix." Can also be read as "Blood Phoenix." Karin's zanpakutō, which is a katana with a red feather attached to the end. Also apparently has some fire-based properties. Its release command is sobiero (聳えろ), the imperative of "to rise."

So, there's shikai number two. Achieved on the exact deadline she set herself, for those of you who like it when things work out neatly. A little bit of rationale for this choice: phoenixes are, of course, famous in mythology for reincarnating themselves after they reach the end of their life cycles and die. They, quite literally, rise from the ashes of their former selves. Also, Isshin's zapakutō, Engetsu, is a fire-type. So if this were the canon universe, Ichigo would have the "getsu" (moon) part (and Getsuga Tenshō), and Karin would have the "En" (scathing) part (the fire abilities). Yuzu is a little different, but hers is actually thematically connected to (her second cousin) Kaien Shiba's: it's a polearm with a spear-point, smells like rain, and is named after a flower that grows on top of water.

Am I a huge nerd? Why yes; yes I am. I think the tendency is mostly harmless.