Fruits Basket Fan Fiction ❯ Custody ❯ Coincidences and differences ( Chapter 25 )

Momo heard them coming long before they knocked on her door. She had been awake for a while now. She even heard her grandmother go into Momiji's room and waited under the covers for a long time before she heard them walking out of his room and into hers.

 

She didn't want to get up. This had always been her favorite day of the year, but now with her parents gone, she dreaded the moment when she had to come to terms with the fact that this was the first of the rest of her Christmases without them. She felt a pain so deep at the thought that she had the unconscious impulse to put her hand over her heart as she fought to keep the tears at bay. Momiji was there, and she wanted him to have a happy day. She wanted to share that happy day with him.

 

She didn't want him to go. She wished that there could be a way to make him stay, but she knew that it was impossible. She wanted to go with Momiji, but she didn't want to become a burden for him, so she made him believe that she wanted to stay because of her grandmother. She could never make him take her in out of pity, only to regret it later to be chained to someone else.

 

She still didn't know what to do with her life. She knew that she had to move into her grandmother's house in the next few days. That meant that she would have to leave her home and everything she knew behind. She didn't want to move on. She just wanted to stay in the comfort of her bed forever, knowing that her onii-chan was just a few steps down the corridor.

 

She couldn't explain the need that she felt for his presence. She had been mourning the loss of her parents for days, but since he arrived, she had felt safe, knowing that her big brother was there to protect and support her.

 

He was a riddle. She couldn't understand how it was possible for him to be “happy all the time”, when his eyes told her a different story. She couldn't read all the emotions that his eyes reflected, but she knew that deep down, Momiji wasn't happy. It was a feeling rather than a conclusion. She kept on thinking about all the little things that both Momiji and Grandma thought that she didn't notice. She knew that they were keeping something from her, but she had no idea as to what that could be.

 

She noticed the way Grandma looked at him, the way her eyes filled with love and pride whenever he spoke. She saw clearly that Momiji loved her grandmother too. The easiest thing to solve that particular riddle would be to assume that Grandma saw another grandchild in him, since he was an orphan too, and that Momiji had found in her the Grandma he never had. That would be too easy, but she knew that it was more than that. Their love for each other was deeper than just the need to fill the void, or just affinity.

 

She knew that he loved her like a sister. He didn't “adopt” her those many years ago: he took her into his heart to be his sister in every sense of the word. She could sense just how strongly he felt for her, and how much he really cared. It would be easy to believe that since he didn't have any siblings he had made her a replacement to fill that place in his family. That would be an obvious explanation, but the way she felt when he hugged her and he showed his concern for her told her that there was much more to it than that.

 

The longing in his eyes told her of a great loss. She knew that he had become an orphan when he was very young. She knew that his closest relatives were his cousins. She knew that he loved Tohru, but that his love was one-sided. He lived by himself, and over time he had lost that eccentric happiness that characterized him. Momiji provided a logical reasoning for that, saying that he had grown up and that he had to change through the years. That was the most logical explanation, but she knew that it was not true. It wasn't the lack of a family, and he had not outgrown his eccentricity: he had resigned himself to some unknown fate, and that involved a loss so great that it filled his eyes with longing.

 

Sometimes, when he was serious or sad, she could swear that she could hear him speaking with her father's voice. She knew that his eyes had the same look as her father's. It would be easy to assume that both were family traits, but she knew that it wasn't the reason. The sadness in their eyes was not a coincidence: she somehow had come to think that it was a shared pain.

 

She knew that people in the street assumed that they were brother and sister at first sight. She knew that they looked alike, and it was the most unsettling thing of them all. She didn't want to think about just how much they resembled each other, because then she would have to think of who she looked like too. Momiji himself told her that she looked just like her mother. The day before, at her uncle's, all her relatives kept on asking about him, and she had caught some of her aunts and uncles exchanging meaningful looks. Apparently they were as confused as she was.

 

Momiji and Momo shared their love for music, but he quit playing while she kept on learning and practicing. They were both bilingual, but he felt more comfortable with Japanese whereas she felt better speaking German. She had always been happy, and just recently she realized that most of the time, Momiji was playing a part, wearing different masks to make everybody believe in a false happiness. She had had a loving family and a home for all her life until now. The way he talked about his own family made her think that he never had a home, even during the few years he and his parents lived under the same roof.

 

So many differences and yet so many coincidences… she didn't know what to think anymore.

 

And yet she kept thinking that all those ideas were the result of an overactive imagination and too many idle hours. If there was something more underneath it all, somebody would've told her something already. They all loved her: her parents, Grandma and onii-chan. They would never keep anything from her.

 

Above all, she felt a strong connection between Momiji and herself. He didn't need to say much for her to understand what he wanted to tell her. She felt happy around him, and Tohru told her that she hadn't seen Momiji so happy in a long time as he was around Momo. She knew that he would do anything for her, and she would do anything for him…

 

…which was the reason why she had to let him go back to his own home, where he could be happy.

 

The doorknob rotated and a second later, Momiji and Grandma entered the room.