Credit goes to roxicons for the image cover. Written for the HitsuKarin Secret Santa Exchange. Prompt: nostalgia.

Karin is supposed to be getting out the Christmas boxes from the attic. Karin is supposed to be taking them down the stairs and stacking them in the living room so that when her family returns they can decorate the house together. Karin is not supposed to be getting distracted by —

"Is that my hat?" Karin says, her eye caught on a half-opened box, with a suspiciously familiar looking red cap peeking through.

"Is it?" Toushirou says, innocuously, closer to the box, and takes the hat out. He gazes at it, considering. "Looks like it."

Toushirou is with Karin because having two people move the Christmas boxes together makes the job go faster, it has nothing to do with being lazy at all, and besides, Karin finds anything infinitely more fun if Toushirou is around.

Also, it's his day off. It's not like he's got anything better to do.

They're almost done, anyway.

"Man, I used to wear this all the time," Karin grins wryly, hand outstretched. He obliges, and their fingers brush as he hands it over, and Karin is quick to shake the dust that's gathered on it. Still, Karin wastes no time in placing it on top of her head. Poses. "What do you think? Still got it?"

"Needs some tinsel," Toushirou snarks, picking up the last of the Christmas boxes and together, they walk to the living room, where he finds the box filled with tinsel. He gazes at her, thoughtful for a moment, then asks. "More red or will silver do instead?"

"More red," Karin decides, plonking the box filled with her old stuff on the sofa, and dons the sparkly red tinsel around her shoulders like a feather boa.

"Perfect," Toushirou says, without a hint of irony and for a fleeting hot second, Karin hates him. Hates how he can say things like this and be so sincere and unaware of the effect that his words have.

"I thought I lost it," Karin says instead, ignoring the flicker of warmth that sparks through her. "Can't believe it's been in there all this time."

"Why was your stuff in the attic anyway?" Toushirou asks, curious.

"Not sure," Karin casually admits, shrugging. She has a couple of working theories, though. "Maybe Yuzu decided that enough was enough, and if I wouldn't tidy my room, she'd just… lessen the collateral damage."

He stares at her.

"Why don't you tidy your room?"

"I do now! I'm far neater than I used to be!" Karin protests, flushing and fidgeting as his judging expression continues, and she feels defensive of herself. "This happened a long time ago, okay?"

"Still."

"We can't all be born to be neat and tidy all the time," Karin mutters under her breath. It came easy to some people.

For her, not so much.

"You're just lazy," Toushirou tells her, unimpressed, and Karin won't argue with that. "So what else is in that box?"

"Oh, curious now, are you?" Karin teases, and it's worth it just to see him splutter and turn red as he fails to respond. Gotcha, Karin thinks with a smirk. "Not in the Christmas spirit anymore, eh?"

"I didn't say that," Toushirou says, archly. "Isn't part of Christmas about looking back and feeling nostalgic?"

"Is that what we're doing now?" Karin asks, slow and deliberate, watching him with a careful smile, knowing that it riles him up ever so slightly.

"We're going down memory lane, so yes. That's exactly what we're doing," Toushirou nods, jaw clenching, before he takes a moment to compose himself and exhale. He folds his arms across his chest, and when he speaks again, there's a newfound confidence that is borderline flirting. "So what's in the box, Kurosaki?"

Karin doesn't even look, grabbing the first thing she finds. A slip of fabric, maybe.

"Tada!"

Toushirou gawks.

"Why," he asks, pointedly, regaining his voice with a burst of irritation, "do you have my bandana?"

Karin nearly breaks her neck as she turns to look at her hand, and finds out that Toushirou isn't wrong in his accusation.

That is his old bandana, and it is mostly definitely in her possession.

Her mind is blank as she tries to come up with words.

"Uh…"

It's a really good question and she has no idea how it got there. It wasn't like she was the one to put her stuff in that box that then went to the attic.

"Did you —" Toushirou demands to know, swallowing, as a look of betrayal and disappointment flashes over his features, "did you steal it?"

"No! Definitely not!" Karin denies instantly, because she's pretty sure that's not what happened. She furrows her brow, trying to think back, desperate to remember something, anything, humming in frustration as Toushirou seethes. And then it clicks. "Ran-chan did! And then she gave to me for safekeeping!"

"Safekeeping," Toushirou echoes, flatly.

"Safekeeping," Karin confirms, snapping her fingers with her other hand as the memory resurfaces and she remembers the details. "She wanted a place where she could hide this bandana from you."

"What?"

Oh, crap.

Maybe she said too much.

She definitely said too much.

"Yeah," Karin says eventually, with a sigh, deciding that she might as well tell him everything. "If I remember things right, Ran-chan said that you looked ridiculous and the only way she'd be able to not laugh at you was if you stopped wearing it."

"Ridiculous?"

"Her words, not mine," Karin hastily says, quick to remind him, because it was clear only a few things were getting through to him. Or rather, his vanity hadn't changed, and Karin had forgotten that remarks like that got to him, especially from his closest friends. "Look, I'm sorry I didn't give it back to you, Toushirou. I honestly forgot I even had it. But hey, good news! We found it again! Why don't you put it on?"

She extends the bandana to him, a belated peace offering.

"Let's see how ridiculous you really look."

"I don't look ridiculous at all," Toushirou grumbles, and Karin bites the inside of her cheek to stop herself from smiling because sometimes he really is simply adorable. After a moment of contemplating, he exhales, and puts it on, and looks at her expectantly. "Don't you agree?"

Karin's breath catches, and she hopes desperately that he didn't hear her.

"Yeah," Karin says, awkwardly, desperate to fight her deepening blush. "It looks good on you, Toushirou. Ran-chan doesn't know what she was talking about."

"You mean that?" Toushirou asks, softly, and Karin resists every part of her that wants to tell him he looks gorgeous.

Or something sappy, like the colour brings out his eyes. She can't let him think too highly of himself, after all.

"Yeah," Karin nods, jerkily, biting back the words that are on the tip of her tongue. "'Course I do. Although…"

"Although?" Toushirou presses.

"You also need to wear some tinsel," Karin says, and walks over to the box full of tinsel, relieved that she can divert the conversation somewhat. "I'm thinking, either blue or gold for you."

"How can you even ask that?" Toushirou rolls his eyes. "Silver all the way."

"You're such a square," Karin snarks, but complies, fishing out silver tinsel, ready to give it to him until she notices Toushirou peering at her box of forgotten things and picking out a card that has a bauble with red and white swirls on the front.

Oh no.

"Toushirou," Karin says, trying to sound casual instead of panicked. "Can I have that? Please?"

There is absolutely no reason for that card to be in that box.

"Why?" Toushirou asks, intrigued. He hasn't opened it yet, which is a relief. "Got something to hide in here?"

Something like that, Karin thinks, biting the inside of her cheek.

"Here," Toushirou says, relenting after a moment, his gaze sweeping over her, softness in his expression. "It's none of my business."

"No, it's alright," Karin says, sighing. It doesn't matter anyway. She wrote it a long time ago. She can use that an excuse, to laugh at her past self's foibles. "You can read it, Toushirou."

"You sure?" Toushirou asks.

One last chance to take it back.

"Yeah," Karin decides, nodding. She shrugs, reasoning. "It's just a Christmas card after all. But first, you have to put the tinsel on."

"Done," Toushirou agrees easily, draping the silver tinsel over him like a scarf, then opens the card.

Karin holds her breath.

"Dear Toushirou — wait," Toushirou stops and stares at her. The card flutters in his hand. "This… this was for me?"

He wasn't supposed to read it aloud!

"Yep," Karin says curtly, ears burning. "Go on."

He gazes at her for a moment longer, mouth slightly open, before he blinks away his surprise and clears his throat.

"Shall I compare thee to winter's frost?" Toushirou speaks slowly, pronouncing each word with care and Karin just watches him, silent, her heart in his hands. "Thou art more lovely and winter-y — what? What is this, Karin?"

More than anything, he looks confused.

Plagiarism, Ichi-nii would have said. Hissed, really, like a cat raising its hackles. Shitty, shitty plagiarism!

"Poetry," Karin admits, eventually, after a beat, accompanied by a sigh at her stupid, idiotic younger self. "It was supposed to be flirty, flirty poetry."

"What?"

"I was trying to write you a love letter," Karin looks away, feeling sheepish as the truth comes out. She takes her red cap off and frowns at it, trying to focus all her attention on it instead of trying to peek at his expression from the corner of her eye. "But. The thing is. I never got round to finishing it."

"There was supposed to be more?" Toushirou says, his tone undecipherable.

Is he impressed? Is he horrified?

Either way, Karin doesn't want to know.

"It was meant to be a sonnet," Karin says, remembering her brother's occasional cycles into Shakespeare. She wouldn't say it was an on and off love affair, just that there were moments when she was unable to tune him out when he got particularly loud about it. And he had been very loud when he found about her oh-so-brilliant idea. "Fourteen lines of utter crap. And I could barely get past two!"

Tweaking a poem is hard, okay? When she'd gotten the notion in her head, she thought she could do it. And then, the more time she spent pouring over the poem and trying to rewrite it, Karin eventually grew to realize that it wasn't as easy as she hoped.

"Line three was just ridiculous, Toushirou! You try changing 'rough winds do shake the darling buds of May'!" Karin continues, heatedly, as memories and the emotions come back to her in waves of embarrassment and frustration. "How am I supposed to shove December in there? Replace 'May', obviously. But then what? Remove 'darling' and hope that it's enough? What if it doesn't fit with that stupid iambic pentameter?"

No! Not good enough!

Rough winds do shake the buds of December?

It just sounds atrocious!

This is why she gave up, in the end. She just couldn't find a way to make it work.

"Iambic pentameter?" Toushirou repeats, looking lost as Karin finishes her spiel, her chest heaving.

"Ichi-nii can explain it better," Karin says, forcing herself to calm down, and tosses her cap onto the floor. "He's the one who went to uni and took a course about all that stuff."

Still. She wants to scream at her younger self. What was she thinking? Why couldn't she have destroyed the evidence when she still had the chance instead of having it put in a box of forgotten things and continued to not remember that she tried to do such a ridiculous deed?

"Karin," Toushirou says, cheeks dusted pink. "Why did you try to write a love letter to me in the first place?"

"Well that's easy. Because I had a massive crush on you, of course," Karin answers without thinking, and then regrets everything she just said and instantly backtracks. "Years and years ago, that is."

"Oh."

"Yeah."

She can't bear to look at him. Doesn't want to know what she'd see if she did. But she can't bring herself to make a self-depreciating remark either — something to make the mood less awkward, so they stand so apart from each other in the living room.

(Maybe when her family get back, things will be better and they'll never have to talk about it ever again.)

"Why me?" Toushirou asks, eventually.

His voice is so soft that Karin almost didn't catch it.

"Are you kidding me, Toushirou? You're my favourite person in the whole world. How could I not?" Karin scoffs, face on fire. But she has to look at him now, because she hates it when he's sad and uncertain with himself, and he's the most gorgeous person she knows that she could never really tear her eyes away from him anyway. "You're kind and funny and grumpy and frowny and fun to wind up and I… y'know. I liked that that about you. And I thought that the best way to tell you how I felt was by ripping off one of the best poets in the business."

She gave up three lines in, but it's the thought that counts, right?

He says nothing.

"Look, you should forget about it," Karin says, rubbing her neck. "It was a stupid idea."

It didn't even get her feelings across properly, if she's been honest. Chances are that if she had been able to finish rewriting the sonnet into a more wintery theme, he'd be staring at her like she'd just spouted gibberish.

And that, probably, would be far more humiliating because he didn't understand what she'd been trying to say.

And her heart, like it is now, would still be in pieces.

"How does the original version go?" Toushirou asks instead, and Karin has to think.

It's true that there's something about Shakespeare that sticks, somehow, but Karin still has to rack her brains for half a minute, even if she did obsess about that particular poem for a good few weeks.

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and temperate," Karin recites, taking a deep breath and hanging her head low. "See? How could I ever beat that, really?"

There's a reason that bard is the best, Karin can hear Ichi-nii snipe at her in the back of her mind.

"I don't know," Toushirou hums, thoughtfully. "I thought using winter twice was a nice touch."

Karin snorts.

"Oh, are you an English Lit critic now?" Karin says, the corner of her lips twitching. "Are you prepared to go head to head with Ichi-nii about why Sonnet Eighty-One is the best sonnet of all of Shakespeare's sonnets?"

"As if," Toushirou rolls his eyes, and seeing his grin breaks out her own grin, and they share laughter for a moment, comfortable with each other once again. As Toushirou idly twirls the silver tinsel, he asks quietly. "Am I still your favourite person?"

Karin's heart pounds in her chest, but she's determined to meet his gaze.

"Yes."

"Good," Toushirou says, "Because you're my favourite person too."

"What?" Karin blinks, stunned by that admission.

"I said," Toushirou cheeks turning red. "You're my fav —"

He doesn't get to finish that sentence because Karin tries to kiss him. Marches as he speaks mid-sentences, pulling him in by the tinsel, and meets his mouth with hers. It's not quite a miss, but it's definitely off-centre, Karin realizes, annoyed at herself, and tries again, this time getting the angle right.

Her hands curl in his soft as snow hair, and then she pulls away, suddenly aware of Toushirou's grip on her hips.

"Sorry," Karin says, heat radiating from every molecule of her body. She watches his bandana slip from his shoulder to the ground — Karin must have done that while she was… while she was kissing him. Toushirou doesn't even seem to notice. "Didn't mean to jump you there."

"Think you kinda did, Karin," Toushirou says, his voice husky, a sultry sort of sound that makes Karin shiver and yearn to invade his space once more, pressing herself close to him until air didn't exist between them anymore.

"Might've done," Karin murmurs, watching him track her tongue as she wets her lips, feeling a little light-headed as her heart skips a beat, and they stay exactly as they are, entranced with each other. "Might've done a little. Yeah."

"C'mere, then," Toushirou smirks, and pulls her in, kissing her slower, deeper, like he intends to take his time with her and relish every second, tangled up in red and silver tinsel.

Eventually the kiss ends, and out of the blue, Toushirou snickers.

"You were going to use a poem to confess," Toushirou says, looking at her adoringly. "I would have never have guessed, Karin."

"Shut up!" Karin says, cheeks beet red, as she muffles her own laughter against his shoulder. "It worked, didn't it?"

Predictably, when Karin recounts her tale, Ichigo is furious.

"You hack!" Ichigo screeches, orange hair standing on end, clearly about to go on a passionate rant about how sacred Shakespeare's words were, and how nobody — least of all Karin! — should mangle his masterpieces when she doesn't even appreciate them! It's a speech Karin knows pretty well. "And it's Sonnet Eighteen, by the way! Eighteen! You can google the first line on your phone and find that out, Karin! It takes five seconds!"

"I don't know," Toushirou says, mildly, his arms around Karin, as he presses a kiss to her forehead. "I think Karin's got a nicer way with words."

He's lying through his teeth, but it's worth it just to see Ichigo howl.