Author Note: Welcome to the twenty-eighth installment of Frozen Moments and the eighth part of "Silence," a ten-part drabble series. We hope you enjoy.

Summary: She is all of twenty-five, and she really isn't ready for this.

Disclaimer: I do not own Bleach or any of its characters. Tite Kubo-sensei does.

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Silence

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ix. emptiness

She is all of twenty-five, and she really isn't ready for this.

"Oh, shit," she says when her water breaks in the middle of the grocery store.

"'Oh, shit,' what do you mean 'oh, shit'? Did they run out of the dango that Hime wa—oh, shit! Oh, shit! Did your water just break? Shit, shit, shit!" Ichigo yells, his hands coming off the shopping cart to anxiously run through his hair. "Shit! This is why I told you to stay at home!"

She glares at him. "Hey, I am pregnant, not helpless. If I want to walk around and shop, I'll walk around and shop."

"Ha! More like waddle around—you're the size of a house!" Ichigo's eyes are darting around wildly, moving from her to the sliding doors to the cart to her again in an anxious circle.

"Oh, yeah? What happened to 'What the hell are you worried about, Karin, you look beautiful'?" she groused in between taking deep, calming breaths. A contraction hadn't hit her yet, but—oooh, there it was. She sucked in another lungful of air.

Ichigo rolled his eyes at her. "You do look beautiful, but you're still the size of a house—let's just say it's a mansion, okay, a nice-looking one, and why the hell didn't you listen to me when I said to stay home?!"

"Will you please call the hospital and stop yelling at me?!" she yells back.

"I'm doing that already!" he says, turning his head so she can see the phone pressed to his ear. Ah, she must have missed that during her contraction.

"Umm…uh…" One of the store clerks is staring at them anxiously, and she notices that they've managed to draw in a small crowd of concerned people. "Would you like some…help?"

"No," she and Ichigo say at the same time. He glares at the people while she smiles tightly and continues, "Don't worry, my brother and I have everything under control."

Still, a nice lady somewhere in her sixties elbows everyone aside and leads her to a chair, calmly holding her hand and distracting her with pleasant chatter and kind questions, while she feeds Karin ice chips that she had the young clerk go fetch.

Ichigo, meanwhile, has managed to get Uryuu on the phone, and instructed him to get the place ready, since they'd be there in a couple of minutes.

"I don't know why he's still friends with you," Karin grumbles. "Not when you keep insulting his intelligence and his skills one second, then muttering how you're going to murder him in his sleep the next if everything doesn't go smoothly. The baby's coming early enough already—our plans are out the window."

"They are not," Ichigo shoots back as he paces in front of her and Ienaga-san—the nice elderly lady—phone still pressed to his ear as he waits for Orihime to pick up. "Yuzu and I planned for every fucking eventuality, and this isn't even the worst one. We're just gonna go with Plan Spilled Ramen."

"Plan Spilled Ramen?" Karin repeated incredulously.

Ichigo scowled. "Hey, Yuzu came up with the names, okay? Anyway, it's the plan where you're in a public space when the contractions happen, and we calmly take you to the hospital, and everyone else will meet us up there. Yuzu will go get Orihime, who'll grab your bag, and Sora will get dropped off at Uryuu's so Nemu can watch over him, and somebody will call Tou-san once we're all there so he can freak out at the clinic and not in the waiting room."

"I'm still not sure about the Nemu bit—she's six months pregnant and your kid takes after you. What if he socks her in the belly or something?" Karin says, glaring at him.

"Hey! He will not!"

"I'm sure everything will be fine," Ienaga-san says soothingly, patting her hand.

"Jeez, what's taking Hime so long to answer?" Ichigo says immediately after that, looking at his watch in a frustrated manner. "It's been—hey, honey! Yeah, just wanted to say that Karin's water broke. Kid's coming about a week early, but don't worry, I already called Uryuu and he said it should be fine. Got a hospital room ready, and Karin's timing her contractions, and a nice lady's with us and she says it's gonna take a bit, so everything's fine. You get Sora ready, okay, and I'll have Yuzu pick you up—Code Burnt Cookies? What do you mean Code Burnt Cookies, Code Burnt Cookies means—oh, shit, your water broke and I'm not there with you?! Oh, shit, holy fuck, okay, stay calm, stay calm and do not panic! Everything will be okay! We are going home right now to take you to the hospital—what do you mean Karin needs to go there first, I just said it'll take a fucking long time—what do you mean calm down! I am calm!"

Ichigo suddenly pulls the phone away from his ear and winces, Orihime's voice coming out of the speakers in high, tinny volume. "Okay, okay, okay—I'll call Yuzu! Just—don't—stay calm! I'll see you soon! I love you!"

Karin watches, mildly incredulous, as Ichigo proceeds to call their sister, screaming into the phone, "It's Code Apocalypse, Code Apocalypse, I repeat, Code Apocalypse! Commence Plan Save the World Again!"

"Your;brother's very enthusiastic, isn't he?" Ienaga-san says, smiling in amusement.

"You could call it that," Karin says dryly. "Hopefully my kid doesn't hate me for naming him her godfather."

Ienaga-san laughs, and Karin laughs with her, trying to ignore the sense that a certain someone should be sitting on her other side and holding her hand, smirking at her joke.

(He's not here and he never will be. She doesn't need him to be here. She doesn't.)

It takes most of a day to give birth to Haru (she's a winter baby, her dark-haired, stubborn girl, but it's winter on the verge of spring, ice ready to melt, and Karin thought it appropriate enough to name her daughter after the season of life and sunshine, because that's what she is to her—new beginnings born of old mistakes).

She doesn't really remember too much of it, just a lot of pain, and screaming at Ichigo, and trying to breathe, and Yuzu feeding her ice chips, and worrying about Orihime, and demanding more drugs.

She remembers her father holding her hand.

She remembers pushing, pushing, pushing.

She remembers crying when it felt like too much. She remembers asking for Toushirou. She remembers telling Ichigo to get him, please get him, she didn't care what anyone said, she needed him here, he said he'd be there for her no matter what, why wasn't he here, she wanted him here, please, please, just please get him for her.

(She really, really, really wishes she didn't remember that.)

What she remembers best is this:

The first loud, indignant cry of her baby ringing through the room, ear-piercing and stubborn and so like Karin herself that she nearly laughs.

Sitting up and reaching out with shaking, exhausted arms as a happily sobbing Yuzu and quietly proud Goat-chin flank her on either side.

And then finally, finally looking down at an absolutely beautiful, perfect little girl, all pale skin and scrunched up nose and stubborn chin, black as midnight hair plastered to her forehead.

And then her baby's eyes open, and Karin's heart shatters and knits itself back together all at once.

"You had to have your father's eyes, didn't you?" she murmurs, gazing down at lovely clear blue eyes, the color of the sea in summer, the color of the sky in deep winter, the color Karin loves and hates and misses in equal measure.

The color of Toushirou's eyes.

She smiles down at her baby girl, tears blurring her vision. "Well, then, Kurosaki Haru, welcome to the world. If you make a habit of ignoring the things I tell you to do, let's hope you always do it with this much style."

Haru is a surprisingly easy baby to look after—quiet, hardly fussing, mostly serious, and sometimes Karin wonders if she imagined that first loud shout in the hospital room—she'd been under a lot of drugs, after all.

She's just so calm most of the time, peering out at the world around her with a self-assured look, taking in all of life's mild crises with a resigned and steady air.

(She inherited more than her eyes from her father, and every day that passes makes that abundantly more clear, and Karin can't tell if she wants this to continue or not.)

Orihime and Ichigo's new baby is a lot more prone to crying, but also more prone to laughing and smiling and making noise in general, so Karin thinks it a fair trade.

Little Natsu (named to match her cousin, Karin suspects) had been born the day before Haru, on January 30. Haru, of course, had taken her time after deciding to be born a week early, and was born on January 31, the last day of the first month of the year, a contradiction in and of herself, fresh starts and old endings all in one.

The two babies are very, very fond of each other, and Goat-chin remarks that they remind him of her and Yuzu, once upon a time, one dark-haired baby girl clinging stubbornly to a light-haired one as they share the same crib.

It's hard, being a mom, and she and Ichigo and Orihime all walk around the house they share looking like raccoons, dark bags under their eyes from lack of sleep.

Still, Karin wouldn't trade it for the world—sometimes she holds her daughter and thinks she couldn't be any happier than this, couldn't want anything more, a calm sort of peace enveloping her.

She always looks up a second later, though, turning towards the entrance of whatever room she's in with a smile already on her face for the man she expects to see leaning on the doorjamb, an answering smirk on his face and laughter in his blue eyes—

—and everything she's missing hits her full force.

(HaruHaruHaru, beats her heart.

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HaruHaruToushirouHaru.)

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Endnote:

And that is part nine of the "Silence Arc." Thank you for reading.

We are intensely sorry for the long wait, but please rest assured—we are not abandoning this story (or any of our other Bleach stories) in the slightest. The last and final part of "Silence" will be posted in one week's time—brace yourselves. It's going to be a happy ending, I swear, but I'll make you work for it.

Anyway, we're glad you've read our work and we hope you have enjoyed/are enjoying/will continue to enjoy it. :)

Thank you to everyone who's reviewed/alerted/favorited this story and/or us. :D

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