Written for Day 8 of HitsuKarin Week 2014. Prompt: OTP Mash Up.

It's all about the legacy, what is left behind and what doesn't remain. It's about the myth becoming reality, the circle of time carving a new groove on the old oak tree. It's about romantics, and how Yuzu has always said those from two different worlds always fall in love.

Kind of like Romeo and Juliet that way, only somehow, it's worse.

It's meant to be like that, only, Karin can't figure out who Yuzu is talking about these days.

If she believed the rumour mill at school, when he was still in high school, then she'd have heard the stories that Ichi-nii was in a relationship with Rukia and they were madly, passionately, violently in love.

If she believed the rumour mill at school, when she is in high school, then she'd hear the stories that she was in a relationship with Toushirou and they were madly, passionately, violently in love.

Wouldn't it be funny if that was true?

When Karin takes up the mantle from Ichi-nii, he doesn't say I will spend the rest of my waiting for her. He doesn't say I'm sorry, good luck, it's your turn to protect the family. He doesn't say you can come to me if you have any questions.

When Karin takes up the mantle from Ichi-nii, she doesn't say anything, just picks up her bag and carries on walking because she will do what she has always done to pick up the pieces and ignore the rest.

(She keeps on walking until she is alone and then stops, knuckles shaking and wishing that she wasn't so perceptive of these things. Ichi-nii may never say it, but that doesn't mean that everything that he's left unsaid is can't be discerned while watching over his hunched figure, knowing that he doesn't know what else he can do. And Karin has always been good at reading him, even when she wishes that she wasn't.)

"I miss those days." Karin sighs, leaning over the balcony, ebony hair tied up in a ponytail. She used to let it be, until it got too long, and now she's too lazy to cut it. "Before any of this happened."

"You don't mean that." Toushirou says, resting under the shade. She doesn't have to bat an eyelid and remove her gaze from the sky to know that he's lying outstretched like a lazy cat, his mop of white hair falling over his closed eyes.

"Some of it, I do." She presses her lips into a thin line, and puffs air out of her nostrils, chest heavy with the weight of her beating heart. "I miss being lazy and ignoring everything."

She feels his eyes on her without even turning around, and there's part of her that feels like she's being cruel and selfish and resentful and frustrated because she misses being who she was at ten, when things were so much simpler and she lived in denial because she was safe playing stupid. When ghosts approached her because they were sad and lonely and she could ignore them because she never had the patience for them anyway.

"Back when you could." Toushirou says softly, and Karin lowers her head. Her shoulders didn't used to feel so heavy, and she knows that he doesn't really get it, but—she's happy that he listens, that part of him must understand, and she can never reveal her insecurities to her big brother.

"Yeah, well. I'm only human. This is what they do. They make the past sound so amazing and they miss it, even when the present day might be better." Karin shrugs, and she knows that without this, before Rukia, Ichi-nii existed in rain and the guilt and drowned himself in it each time June 17th came around. Without this, she wouldn't be able to protect Ichi-nii. Without this, that she would probably still be ignoring the ghosts in Karakura because she saw no reason to intervene.

Toushirou's lucky, in a way. Because if her former self hadn't unravelled and she hadn't stopped sticking her head in the ground, then she probably wouldn't have become friends with him, and try to hang out with him any time he stopped by. She blames the parakeet and being able to cry again.

Because crying was the end and crying was the beginning, and everything changed after that.

Having Toushirou around grounded her.

"Look at me now, with all this responsibility." She grins, but it's grim, and it feels like she's cracking at the edges. She blinks in quick succession because there's a time and place for crying, and it's times like this when she feels like she needs a reality check. She's complaining to a captain about what he does for a living. "At least I don't have to do paperwork."

"Karin," He says, and there it is again, the twist in her stomach, a dreaded truth that she doesn't want to admit. "You don't have to this alone."

"Yeah." She looks at him, brushing her hair behind her ear, and swallows her fears. "That's why I have you, right?"

"Well, it's not like you're a substitute shinigami." Toushirou points out, smirking wryly at her.

"I have a soccer ball." Karin grumbles. "That's practically the same thing."

These days, she understands why Ichi-nii took the lone wolf approach at school.

It's amazing how it works, leaving her undisturbed by the majority of the class.

The teachers, however, are out to get her because they know that some things are too strong for the bloodline to ignore.

"It's nice being scary." Karin admits with an evil smile, teeth bared at the great blue unknown, and she's dying, sweating out beneath the sun, legs bare, shoes and socks removed, so she's just lying there until someone gets her a juice box. She should roll into the shadows, but she can't. Not when the sun is warm and tickling her belly and she's feeling lazy. "But it's pretty lonely too."

"You're not alone, Kurosaki." Toushirou reminds her, kicking her gently. She can see his eye-roll shape the clouds, tearing them up and shredding them with his no-nonsense attitude. Especially when he uses her surname in a tone like that. "Now get up and do your damn job."

Karin ignores him, lolling her head to face him, and that side of her face is going to get grass stains, she knows. Still. There's part of her that wants to emulate Ran-chan whenever he's like this.

"You're not Rukia, you can do it yourself."

"What happened to being responsible?" He comments drily, lifting an eyebrow, and that makes Karin grin in spite of herself.

"Alright, fine." Karin yawns, accepting his hand and stands up, and makes a promise to herself that she will sleep after this. It's pretty tiring work, and she doesn't do half of what Ichi-nii did. "I can be responsible for a little while."

Toushirou doesn't ask, and Karin doesn't tell.

But it's there: something lurking underneath her skin, and she's tempted, sometimes, to bring him home with her, see what Ichi-nii would do, see if it would knock him out of his slump. But she never does, swallowing down her fears, and waves Toushirou goodbye for the end of another day.

At home, Ichi-nii stares out of windows. There's a vacant expression in his eyes, and Karin lowers her eyes and doesn't say a thing.

She thinks about the rumour mill that scuttles about school, the history to her brother, and how she's inevitably connected to it, tied because of their namesake, the similarity of their personality.

So maybe the rumours were partly true.

Like it or not, Ichi-nii had fallen in love with Rukia, and now he wasted away, lovelorn and sad when he thought no one was looking. And then he'd smile so bright like it was hurting him, like nothing was wrong, and that was worse and Karin felt sick just looking at him.

The legacy goes like this: Ichigo falls in love, and Rukia doesn't.

And then, one day, the universe plays a cosmic joke, because it has a twisted sense of humour, and Karin doesn't know what she should do.

She would laugh if she could.

Toushirou kisses her, and Karin would laugh at the irony, the inverse situation if she could and she'd cry because when Yuzu talks about Romeo and Juliet, talks about Ichi-nii and Rukia, talks about Toushirou and Karin, it's the furthest thing from her mind.

He kisses her one day, and it's a joke, it has to be.

Fleetingly, she thought if she could deny, repress, ignore his crush on her, then eventually it would go away.

Except how could she ignore it when he looked like her as if she'd changed the world for him by being there? She saw it in peripheral vision, and acts unaware for her own protection and she pretends so hard not to see his heart on his sleeve, written so clearly over his face, like it is for Ichigo when he thinks about Rukia.

And then Karin would look at Toushirou, trying to be oblivious, and he couldn't look at her for too long, flinching like she'd burned him.

He tried to hide it, Karin knew, because he never said anything, didn't try to act any different, except clearly, the both of them had, and were willing to leave this thing between them unacknowledged, and what else could Karin do but fall on her defence mechanism to ignore it?

She'd tried to feel the same way, looked at him and wondered if she could imagine a future with him, and it was almost easy because Yuzu had told her cheesy plots and romantic novels, swooned and drew parallels from the two families of Verona, two separate worlds, entwined in their doomed tragedy, and yet… and yet, she'd shaken her head and couldn't.

Try as she might, she couldn't see him anything more a friend.

And Karin had never wanted him to be anything more than a friend. He was her friend, from another world, and that was enough for her.

But then he looked at her, and she'd smile back, pushing down her confliction and trying not to show that she was uncomfortable in the way he looked at her a bit too intensely after she got hurt, because she knew and it fucking hurt.

He kisses her, tentative and shy and nervous, and clings to her like he's a dying man, he is a dying man, he is a dead man from another world, and Karin lets the moment last for a second, longer perhaps, her heart racing for all the wrong reasons, and tries again to see if maybe—and no, it's impossible, it's wrong wrong wrong—Karin pushes him away, shoves him hard.

She can taste blood in her mouth. His lips were soft, chapped, tasted of winter. And then she steps back and wipes it away.

Toushirou stumbles back, gaze confused, her blood on his mouth, shiny and red and wet.

Karin doesn't say anything, touching her mouth that feels swollen, and it's the opposite of happiness, its fear and dread that sends heat rushing to her cheeks, and pity too.

She doesn't feel any different towards him.

"You're my friend, Toushirou." She says, and hates that he looks crushed, because she's not heartless, she's always fucking cared about it, even if it's not the way he evidently wants. "My best friend, but—"

"Nothing more." He finishes, and Karin wonders if she should step back and widen the distance between them even more. Or maybe she should run, in spite of her reputation for being headstrong and determined, nobody seems to remember that she played the willing idiot happy to turn a blind eye on things she didn't like.

"Yeah." She nods, and she can't run, not now, when every part of her is rooted to the ground, and her voice sounds dead to her ears because she's breaking his heart while hers remains intact. "Pretty much."

"I shouldn't have kissed you."

"No, it was—it was a good kiss." Karin winces, because that sounded terrible, even for her, even if was true and she has nothing to compare it against. She tries to start again, blinking too fast because she's certain the room is spinning and she can't possibly think. Her hands meet behind her back, she straightens her shoulders and does what she always does: she tells the truth and breaks his heart. "I'm happy that you're my first kiss. I'm glad it was you, because I trust you. But it can't happen again."

"Okay."

"Aren't I too young or something?" Karin jokes, and it's the wrong thing to say, she knows immediately, but she can't stop herself from making the situation worse and suddenly she's babbling. "I know I turned sixteen last week but, you're still, a hundred, right, something—"

"What happed to age is a just a number?" He says, callous, and Karin flinches.

It's not fair that he repeats her words, back when she thought that Ichigo and Rukia were madly, passionately, violently in love. Her and Yuzu were really convinced that they loved each other, it was that simple, because love is that simple, even for—a tragedy of star-crossed lovers. The love is simple, the story is not.

But then, if Rukia loved him, really loved Ichi-nii, wouldn't she have appeared, even if she was invisible?

(Here's something Karin doesn't say when she looks at Rukia for the first time and she's introduced as the lodger: oh, so that's why you seem so familiar, you were here all along.

Because she knew something was different when their house got damaged, saw the strange lady besides Ichi-nii and wondered who she was, and then feigned ignorance when Yuzu's pyjamas went missing, partly because she didn't know, and then later, because it was too awkward to bring up.

Karin says hello, because that's what people do when meeting someone for the first time, be it spirit, person or shinigami. She says hello because it's good manners and Yuzu would have elbowed her if she hadn't, and she smiles and figures that she'll fit right in, because it's not like she hasn't already.)

"I was wrong." Karin says, and bites her kissed lips, wishing that he'd never done it at all. "It happens, sometimes."

So she'd taken up Ichi-nii's mantle, but she hadn't followed his footsteps exactly. Because at the end of the day, Karin still held the supernatural world at arm's length, and Ichi-nii welcomed it with everything he had because it made him useful and Karin fucking hated her big brother for thinking that way.

And Toushirou—her friend, her best friend—was part of that supernatural world, and that left her in a tricky position, because she never could get her head around that, no matter how long he stayed by her side. Karin still pushed him away, because they were of two different worlds, and perhaps it was a curse on the stars that they had to meet, that Kurosakis were given spiritual powers and meet shinigami.

She didn't like the supernatural, never had, never would, but she liked Toushirou, and at the end of the day, that made such little difference.

"Stop looking at me like that," Karin spits, and maybe this is why Rukia has stayed away, because she couldn't stand it anymore. "Just—give me a moment."

"Karin."

She takes more steps back, more distance is good, more distance is great, and this is the last thing that Karin ever wanted—this is the opposite of everything she wanted.

Her voice sounds hysterical, high-pitched and panicked.

"Just, give me some space, okay?"

It feels like something out of Romeo and Juliet.

Ichigo would know. He's the one who likes Shakespeare, respects him, quotes him.

He talked about it once, criticizing how easily Romeo used to be in love with Rosaline, how quickly he transferred his affection almost instantaneously to Juliet. It's not his favourite play, but everyone knows how the story goes.

And who is Rosaline, but a girl who is never onstage, a character who needs no actress, a person who never wanted to be loved by Romeo.

It's not like Karin asked to be Rosaline, but when she thinks about it, that's the role she has, and everyone else wants her to be Juliet.

She doesn't know if that's worse.

She wonders if Ichi-nii ever realized that Romeo was trapping Rosaline in something she would never want, like Paris did to Juliet.

She wonders if Ichi-nii ever mentioned these plays to Rukia, because they were real literature instead of the books she secretly got from Yuzu, and he would have told her all about Shakespeare's romantic tragedies and romantic comedies, and he'd look at her and—

And—

And he's break off suddenly because—

(She thinks Rukia would realize. She would notice and say nothing.)

She finds him after a week, when she's processed things a little bit more, forced herself to face the facts that she's avoided up until that moment. She calls him, and they arrange to meet, and she is scared.

Because she's heard so many things about love ruining friendships, and this—she doesn't want this to be the cause of something that makes them strangers. She'd go insane, without him.

Her heart lurches when she sees him, every fibre of her being thinking it's really not fair because it's not, it really isn't, but this is what's happened, and she's going to address this.

"I don't feel the same way." She says, and the air freezes as she waits for his response.

"Okay." He nods, accepting it at face value and then scrutinizes her, and speaks after an awkward pause and Karin still feels awkward and guilty and unrequited love's a bitch and it must show on her face. "It was just a kiss, Kurosaki."

She stares at him, because she knows he's lying. Guys like him don't kiss anyone without a reason. And if he has feelings for her, beyond just a school crush, then… Karin doesn't know what to think, or how she's meant to deal with the situation. Would Yuzu know? Yuzu might know. Yuzu reads books, she would know.

"Right," Karin's voice doesn't break, betray her thoughts, but still, she feels odd about agreeing with him, and she should stop reading too much into this, except how does a crush just go away when she's been ignoring this for months? It was just a kiss, and it will go away and they will remain friends. "Of course it was." And she feels more relieved, believing that lie.

"You're not going to lose me just because of a kiss or because you don't feel the same way." He flicks her head, and heat rushes to her cheeks.

"Ow!"

"It's a shame, but—I'll deal."

It's easier to breathe now, somehow. Now that he's admitting it, and she has this… security over their friendship, because that's the root of her fear, that they'll lose this, just because she doesn't feel anything more.

It gives her hope.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." He states, because he's grumpy and hates stating the obvious, but clearly, stating the obvious is something she needs, otherwise she'll believe every cliché that romanticists will start spouting, and that would make everything even more disastrous. "You're being stupid if you thought that you didn't need my help." He scoffs, and it's like nothing has changed, it's like days before she realized and nothing has changed, and they can fall back into this easy steadfast trust they have in each other.

Karin narrows her eyes, recognizing the mockery that is his speciality whenever he's around her. "Excuse me, I was doing just fine by myself."

She swats him lightly with the back of her hand, and she thinks to herself, okay, I can do this. She thinks, I can deal with this.

"Sure you were, Kurosaki." He deadpans, and for the first time in a while, Karin grins and means it, because maybe this meant that loving her friends was okay, and being friends, staying friends, wasn't so hopeless after all.

It's legacy, the ouroboros, how history repeats itself and finds a sick sense of humour in every generation. It's how Yuzu siphons the story off Ichigo's retellings, talks about Romeo and Juliet, and how Karin defies it without even trying—because there is part of her that will never let legacy work the way it wants to.

It's the way a Montague falls in love with a Capulet, but the Capulet doesn't feel the same way. It's the way a Capulet falls in love with a Montague, but the Montague doesn't reciprocate. Two different worlds, the mortal and the supernatural, and that's how simple a story can translate into anything at all.

There's two different sides, and four kinds of people.

It's how they're neither Montague nor Capulet because Karin doesn't know if their love is even forbidden, but it sure as hell isn't requited, and so—

It will fade.

And then Karin sees him on the periphery, Ichi-nii, Toushirou, gazing a little lovesick, and then she doesn't know how long it takes for love to fade.

But she hopes, if she and Rukia are the uninterested Rosaline, and Ichi-nii and Toushirou are the pining Romeos, then they will find their Juliet and have a happy ending, unlike Shakespeare's tragic end.

So she holds her breath and looks away, pretending not to notice, waiting for love to fade.