STRAWBERRY THE TEENAGE DADDY CHAPTER 0.8
Despite everything that was happening, Karin had, much to even her own surprise, remained calm. Scowling lightly and confused to all oblivion, but calm; very much so. The noise and chaos of the Kurosaki Household had tempered her expectation for the unexpected over the years … recent development included.
She didn’t know who the purple-haired woman was; not that she would care to under any other circumstance in the first place: purple hair and dark skin in turn-of-the-century Japan were oddities, but weren’t worth turning a second head towards, even if she was a head-turning beauty. Not in the mode she carried herself currently, anyway; there was a strange sort of … siphon that had invisibly latched on to this moment. An energy that seemed to be lost from where it should have been in the first place; a spunk that had been drained to its floor and replaced by all manner of guilt, uncertainty and … something. Karin had never met this woman before, whoever she was, but she was quite sure that sitting down with her eyes downcast and her hair practically curtained over her features wasn’t how she normally conducted herself.
Or, Karin guessed, it might have just been the baby.
‘ICHIGO, DO YOU EVEN
REALIZE WHAT YOU’VE SET OFF HERE?!’
She’d never seen her father so furious, either … or genuinely concerned. The old man had lifted Ichigo off his feet before without an issue, but there was a raw worry that seemed to emanate with every shake he made of his son. Ichigo hung on for dear life, his head almost hitting the ceiling lights once or twice as the wooden table of the family room creaked under the weight of two men. Karin sighed as her brother attempted to stammer a response between their father’s rants, but all the old man appeared to be dead set on accomplishing was the vibrating the former’s bones into dust.
‘L-Look,’ Ichigo managed, his tip-toes touching the table. ‘I—we came to you, right, pops? We came to you, okay?’
Isshin gritted his teeth, holding his son’s collar tightly and dragging him so close that Karin thought that their father was going to do what their father had practically threatened to do for so long and finally bite her brother’s head off with an almighty chomp. There was an oddly tense air around their boisterous excuse of an old man, and Isshin’s knuckles practically threatened to bleed with how tightly his hands were gripped around the fabric of Ichigo’s shirt. Ichigo, to his credit, didn’t dare to shake his father out from whatever state of emotion he was in, lest he get shook around again, or worse … further upset him. There was a measure of guilt that seeped into Ichigo’s soul (figuratively), recalling how his father had, even with all the ambushes and the crazy family rules, had placed a sort of silent expectation for him to be responsible and considerate in his decision-making; facing down death—in its most literal and by its own conceptual limits—was actually a preferable notion to
actually potentially disappointing his father, especially in the way that he had.
Kurosaki Isshin’s purple face was more frightening than any of the foes that he had faced, save for Ikkaku … but that was mostly because Ikkaku’s baldness was so ethereally unnatural that he believed that even that that Aizen lackey with the fox face would give a little twitch. There was something unreadable, incomprehensible, to what Isshin seemed to express. There was a worry—a sincere, fatherly worry—that was etched into the wrinkles under his eyes. The gritted teeth, the furrowed brow and—
‘AND
YOU!’
He had turned his attention towards the unknown woman; the grip around Ichigo’s shirt loosened. His son dropped like a sack of potatoes; the woman, still hanging her head and with her gaze firmly on anywhere
but the subjects present in the room, did not say a word as the doctor advanced on her, causing Karin to almost rise from her seat to stop him..Her father had never been physical with anyone but Ichigo, but at the same time, she’d never seen her father in such a state as this. Ichigo, however, had prevented her from breaking that
almost with a swift action of his own, standing between their father and his girlfriend—it felt strange to even entertain such a concept right now—with such conviction that for a moment she thought that she’d seen her own father somehow create a mirror image of himself.
‘
Hey,’ Ichigo began, a rough edge to his voice as a flash of warning came over his gaze. ‘You can toss me around all you like, yeah … but if you’re oversteppin’ those bounds, old man, then …’
Isshin closes his eyes, tilting his head back as he attempts to … collect some semblance of calm. It takes several deep breaths and a smack of his open palms against the side of his head, but he manages to do so, somewhat. His face wears the grave, urgent … yet reserved expression that—dare anyone say it—actually connected him to his profession more than anything else. There was a professional aura about him now; a shift in character that seemed more akin to a dam holding back a wash of irrationality. If Karin didn’t know her father as she had, she would have marked such a shift as unabashedly frightening.
It really was.
‘Stay out of things you aren’t even up to your nuts into, Ichigo,’ said Isshin, his tone authoritative, rigid … and without a single ounce of humor; the euphemism takes Ichigo aback for a moment—a moment that Karin almost expects her brother to thoroughly back up on—but he recovers quickly enough to resume his place as the wall between his father and the young woman, who Karin was, at this moment, genuinely worried for.
Isshin didn’t appear pleased with this bout of stubbornness.
‘If you need someone to yell at and throw punches, you’re lookin’ at him, okay?’ Ichigo threw right back, one arm protectively outstretched and absolutely refusing to budge from his spot. ‘She doesn’t need this one—’
‘
Isshin.’
The words of the purple-haired woman seemed to halt time to a stand-still. Ichigo’s eyes widen in a mix of horror and realization.
Never had he heard his father’s name spoken with such …
familiarity.
‘Yoruichi-san …’
The woman, Yoruichi, raised a tired gaze.
‘
D-Did you date my father?!’
Two things happened within two seconds.
The first was the installation of a new living room skylight, courtesy of Karin’s brother and the sound barrier-shattering foot of the woman who her brother had, to her knowledge, sown his seeds with.
The second … was Karin accepting that she had truly, definitively, gained a sister.
She couldn’t wait for Yuzu to come back from her shopping trip.