Fruits Basket Fan Fiction ❯ Coda ❯ Conversation ( Chapter 1 )

It was quiet. Yuki and Kyou had been ordered to attend a meeting of the juunishi, and Hatori had further ordered both of them to get some rest afterward. It had been two weeks since Tohru's accident, two miserably endless weeks of seeing the sweet and cheerful girl lying in a hospital bed and barely speaking. All of the people who cared about her had stood vigil at her bedside, at first fighting over the privilege.

One such fight had been going on, Black Haru fighting against Kyou for making Risa cry, the yankee yelling at both of them to be quiet, when the room had filled with the sound of Tohru's sobs. Hanajima had at that moment returned from running errands and evicted everyone with a single glare before taking Tohru in her arms and rocking her like a desolate child.

Eventually, the goth girl had come out to rake them all with a contemptuous gaze. In the quiet and flat manner that her listeners recognized as rage, Hana outlined the new schedule and rules for visitation. Hana and Uotani would be allowed at all times, as official relatives. Hatori would be allowed all the privileges befitting Tohru's doctor. Yuki and Kyou would be allowed to count as family provided that they did not disturb Tohru. The rest would be limited to the hospital's normal visiting hours, despite the luxury of a private room.

The waves of electric hostility pouring from the dark girl, combined with the shame of having made Tohru cry, convinced everyone to accept the conditions without a fuss. The days had quickly settled into a routine, but spending every available waking moment in a hospital was taking its toll on all of them.

"It's almost too quiet without Kyou-kun and the prince." Uotani commented as she pulled a chair up to face Hatori.

He looked up and put aside the medical journal he had been staring at. He still wasn't sure, despite the enforced intimacy of the past weeks, whether he liked or disliked this girl with her mannish straightforwardness and unfeminine ways. Still, he admired her devotion to her friend, and playing against her was a challenge. He had to work to beat her, whether at chess or cards. "If I could, I would order you and Hanajima-san to go home and sleep, as well. You'll do Tohru no good if you collapse from exhaustion."

"Maybe you should lead us by example, then, instead of only leaving here to shower and shave and visit Akito." She said the name contemptuously, as she had ever since the accident.

"There are things you do not know--" Hatori stopped when she snorted, and wondered again at how sweet, gentle Tohru came to be such good friends with this rough girl. "Still, I am a doctor, and better prepared for such a situation. You and Hanajima are still young--"

"And so we're more than energetic enough to run rings around a decrepit old man like you." She laughed at the way his face tightened slightly. Two weeks of close contact let her interpret it, correctly, as pique. "Just shut up and deal the cards, jii-san."

He pulled out a deck of cards and shuffled them, glancing at where Hanajima was reading quietly to Tohru. He missed the way that Uotani focused on his long fingers, as she had looked away before he turned back. They were mostly silent for a while, speaking only as the game necessitated.

It wasn't until well after the breathing of the other two girls indicated sleep that the silence was broken, abruptly, by Hatori's voice. "How is it that you are such good friends with Tohru when you are nothing alike?"

She looked at him assessingly, more like a rival businessman or a street punk than a proper lady. After a moment, she said, "How come you didn't fight for your girl?"

His expression shifted instantly to the emotionless mask most people knew, the same one she had seen the first time she met him. It had softened somewhat in the late night hours they spent together, playing games and keeping watch. "What do you know about Kana?"

"Was that her name? Tohru said you were deeply in love once, but you gave her up after she blamed herself for causing family trouble." She shrugged, dismissing his tragedy with a lazy movement of her too-broad shoulders.

"That is... personal. You know nothing of the circumstances." He focussed on his cards, trying to remain calm and unaffected.

Her smile was brittle, mocking. "And you know nothing of what's between me and Tohru, and it's very personal. I'm not the one who started with the nosy questions here."

Hatori made a noise in his throat, somewhere between a grunt and a laugh. "Point taken." He picked up his cards and they resumed playing, silently. One of them would rise periodically to check on the patient, ut nothing was out of the ordinary.

It was sometime in the early hours of the morning, when all the world was so dark and still that it seemed they were the only two people on earth, that Hatori spoke again. "I didn't fight for her because it would have hurt her beyond what she was capable of enduring."

Uotani looked up from her cards. "Sounds like she was a wimp. You're probably better off."

"Better off?" For all that it was in a whisper, Hatori's voice held the sting of a whip. He jerked his hair aside, displaying the eye that was slightly shrunken in its socket and completely clouded, the multitude of tiny, silvery scars around it almost forming a star pattern. "Is this better off? This is all I'm left with, when I was happy once."

She looked at him coolly, unflinching in the face of a deformity that had made others pale and look away. That had made Kana look away, in shame and disgust. He dropped his hand and said bitterly, "I am only better off in knowing I did not buy my happiness at the expense of hers."

"Gin." Uotani lay her cards down, then reached over and brushed his hair aside. He flinched at the warmth of her fingers as she traced the ridge of his brow and looked closely at his scars. Just when he didn't think he could tolerate it one second longer, she took her hand away and said, "Well you won't win any contests for being the prettiest anymore, but it doesn't hurt your looks all that much. Adds a bit of macho, makes you more handsome than pretty."

He looked at her, open mouthed with shock. "Handsome? It's /grotesque/."

She made a small humming noise, neither assenting or dissenting, then said, while dealing a new hand, "Have you ever noticed that one of Tohru's pinkies is crooked?"

Hatori picked up his cards, trying to re-gather the shards of his impassive façade. "Yes, she said she broke it once."

"I was broken by a metal pipe." Uotani calmly took a card and put another one down.

"You broke it?" Hatori had seen the girl swinging the length of pipe in Kyou's direction once or twice, and had been reluctantly impressed at the ease with which she did so.

"No, although it was mine. I'd been stupid and let my guard down. Got trapped in an alley without backup by some girl I had pissed off." She smiled grimly, the points of her canines just showing. "I'd insulted their leader's looks, you see."

Her hand reached up, pulling her heavy bangs up and back. Hatori's breath hissed out as his physician's eye took in the mottled scarring that ran along her hairline, from above the ear to the temple. It had been a knife, but not a very sharp one, and one that had been carelessly applied. There must have been an infection of some sort, and it was obvious that the person doing the stitching had been unskilled, to say the least.

"Tohru was walking home and saw me being dragged off. She didn't know who I was, but as soon as she had called out for help, she picked up my pipe from where I'd dropped it and rushed in." Uotani smiled faintly and dropped her hair before picking up her cards. "Your turn, doc."

Hatori shook his head and looked at his cards, putting one down randomly and picking another up. "What happened?"

"What do you think happened? Tohru tripped, skinned her knee, knocked down some trashcans and dropped the pipe on her own fingers. It's a mercy only the pinky was broken." She snorted and took her turn, gesturing for him to take his. "Still, it caused enough distraction that I ended up being the one with the knife."

She didn't think that she would ever forget the sick feeling of plunging the knife into the stomach of the girl who had been intent on taking a scalp as a prize. She hadn't meant to cause that much damage, had been aiming for the girl's thigh, but the blood pouring down her forehead had gotten into her eyes. Her vision had blurred from the pain and the blood loss, and her instincts had been screaming for survival at all costs. She had watched, horrified, as the other girl had fallen away, the hands clutching her stomach not hiding the amount of dark blood pouring out. Uotani had stopped long enough to get the knife off the ground and to pick up her pipe before grabbing her rescuer and pushing them both out of the alley and down the street, no destination in mind but away.

Two streets over, she had stopped to call an ambulance from a pay phone, just in case the others who had been with the wounded girl hadn't thought to. By the time she was done, the adrenaline that had been driving her was spent, and she had collapsed into a dead faint. "I woke up to see Kyoko, Tohru's mom, changing the bandage on my head. I would have been arrested if I had gone to the hospital, so Kyoko and Tohru took care of me."

Hatori didn't know what to say, so he said nothing, merely going through the motions of the card game. After a few minutes, he said quietly, "You could get that fixed, you know. It might not disappear, but it would be considerably less--"

"Grotesque?" He winced and she laughed, but not altogether unkindly. "Right now I'm pretty focused on keeping a roof over my head. As it is, I had to call in some favors to get the evening shift."

"Evening shift? Do you mean to tell me you're juggling work as well as school and coming here?" Hatori was almost as horrified at that as he had been at her story.

Uotani looked at him quizzically. "What does it matter to you what I do? I'm fine." She looked down at her cards and slapped them down. "Gin. Maybe you're the one overdoing it if I can beat you this badly."

"Hm." Hatori watched absently as she shuffled the cards, his mind elsewhere.

(More stuff would go here, but a sneak peek of the next scene:

"You had no RIGHT! I needed that job, and you got me fired."

His lip curled up slightly as he tossed her own words back at her. "You're probably better off." )