Fruits Basket Fan Fiction ❯ Black Moon ❯ Black Moon ( One-Shot )

Title: Black Moon

Author: Flamika

Disclaimer: The characters in this piece of fiction belong to Takaya Natsuki. No profit is made. Story concept belongs to me.

Pairings: None

Warnings: angst

Rating: PG

Notes: Written for the Lunar New Year's Challenge on the Altar of Akito community on Livejournal.

Summary: The one night of the year that Akito experiences death and rebirth..

*

"Akito, why doesn't the God dance at New Year's?"

Though twelve years in the past, Yuki's ignorant question still echoed in the catacombs of Akito's mind, the little niches of death where she stored all memories, all the words, all the people that she had once cherished.

Her hopelessly insufficient reply had not eased the perplexed look in Yuki's deep gray eyes. He had probably pondered the question for the rest of the day. Maybe he was thinking about it even now, in his warm little room at Shigure's house.

She doubted it.

Alone in her bed with ebony moonlight streaming through the window to form a darkly luminous puddle around her prostrate figure, Akito was cold. Cold as ice, as snow, as Death's bony fingers, weary from cutting down the lives of countless mortals. She wanted to go out into the wintry night, lie down in the pristine blanket of snow, and gaze up at the cloudless sky, but all vitality was leaving her. She barely had enough strength left to drag her futon over to the sweetly seductive moonbeams coalescing on the tatami mats. But here she was, body arranged with artless grace, devoid of covers because she knew no amount of blankets would preserve the warmth of her skin. Had she the strength to do so, Akito would have taken off her robes and lain nude under the barrage of lunar kisses.

Now, all there was left was to wait for her death.

Black moonlight caressed her flesh, turning it the color of new bones, bleached arcs of gleaming ivory, shining dully with all the flesh and blood peeled away from them. She felt so light, as if her body had absorbed the virgin radiance of the new moon and become nothing but air and darkness. Tonight, if Yuki looked to the sky, no moon would bare itself to his unholy eyes, but Akito could see the moon dark and naked on its starry cloak, a void of emptiness that bathed her lovingly, whispering to her, calling her from her cage of mortal flesh.

All the breath left her body; the lingering remnants of warmth drained from her skin like blood into a basin. For a brief moment, Akito was afraid, just as she was every year, but Death was as persistent as he was cold, and within moments of her body's defeat, her spirit, her soul, her essence ascended into the moon.

How could she have explained this to Yuki so many years ago? How does one describe what it's like to experience death for the span of a single night, to dance in a lake of darkness on the surface of the new moon, so close to Death's immortal embrace that she could feel cold breath emerging from his passionless lips?

Akito never danced at New Year's because the Dance of the God came at a later date, on a night when the black moon was visible only to her. It was not a heady pas de deux performed in front of a gathering of cursed souls, but a lonely dance with Death as her sole observer.

No one would ever understand. So Akito kept it inside, this dream she had once a year when she stood on the moon's dark surface with the Juunishi from the dead year in her arms, cradled lovingly to her chest. This year, it was the Tiger who lay cold and lifeless in Akito's embrace. In death, Kisa's face was like an angel's, tawny golden eyes delicately shut, ready for a sleep that would last twelve years. In a distant fashion, Akito knew it was not really Kisa in her arms, but the spirit of the Tiger, onto which Akito had projected the young girl's face. In this bleak and barren land, Akito needed a touch of familiarity, and what was more familiar or precious to her than her Juunishi?

She lowered Kisa's cold body to the dark waters that lay still and motionless underneath Akito's bare feet. The liquid immediately stole the Tiger from Akito's arms, sucking her down, down, down into the inky depths. Gone. Dead.

Back on earth, Souma Kisa's heart skipped a beat.

Akito began her lonely dance on the watery surface of the black moon. Only during the night of the year's first new moon, when the austere lunar landscape lay untouched by the sun's reflected rays, could Akito's tender, mortal feet bear to make contact with the otherworldly substance of her dream-moon.

Akito danced through the entire night, her limbs numb with cold, her mind blank and pure. One stray thought, one falter in the timeless waltz with the moon, and Death might claim her. She would fail. The Zodiac would fall apart. But no God had ever failed before, and Akito refused to be the first.

Finally, when a stinging burn of sunlight washed over her skin, she knew it was time. At her feet, just beneath the shadowy waters, was a small, white face. Akito ceased her dance and knelt, dipping her arms into the liquid darkness to draw the Rabbit from his slumber. Black water sluiced from his ceremonial robes, coursing down skin flushed and healthy with revitalized life. Akito watched with infinite patience as warm, chocolate brown eyes fluttered open.

On earth, Souma Momiji's heartbeat inexplicably quickened.

Akito held the Rabbit close to her, relishing the soft skin that burned hot like...

Fire. Coming over the horizon. Burning her. Chasing her back to Earth with the reborn Rabbit safe in her embrace.

Air rushed back into her lungs, filling them in one gasp of beautiful agony. There was morning sunlight on her skin, so warm and sweet, and for an instant, Akito thought she was eight years old again, and Yuki was crying at her bedside. Crying, because he thought she had died. Crying, because he was so happy Akito hadn't left him.

"Yuki," Akito whispered, turning her head, expecting to see the frail, kimono-clad Rat at her side, where he belonged.

But there was no one, and at that moment as she awoke from her yearly death with no one to greet her, Akito missed him more than anything in the world. She ignored the tears stinging her eyes and instead hugged herself tightly with fragile arms that still remembered the warmth and shape of Momiji's dream-body, using those phantom sensations as a shield against her crushing loneliness as the rising sun ushered in the first true day of the Year of the Rabbit.

~fin

2 January 2005

A/N: I know I overshot the 1000 word cap so I guess I failed the challenge, but the subject was interesting to write about so I'm not upset. :P The premise of the challenge was write an Akito-centric story about the first new moon of the year, when the Chinese New Year begins and the Zodiac animal of the new year displaces the one from the previous year.