Fruits Basket Fan Fiction ❯ Force of Destiny ❯ The Curse ( Chapter 11 )

Disclaimer: Takaya Natsuki owns Fruits Basket. I just like to pretend she let me borrow her beautiful boys for a while...

Chapter 11: The Curse

Yuki continues to look into my eyes, smooth brow creased, searching my face for...something, I don't know what. After a wordless moment or two, he seems to discover whatever he wanted, for he just nods his head once, brow clearing and shoulders relaxing. He doesn't release my chin, though, so I pull gently away and take his hand in mine. I'm unwilling to give up all the comfort he offers.

I bestow a small, almost tentative smile on him and squeeze his hand to let him know I'm alright. He smiles in return, transforming his face to something even more ethereally handsome. My heart skips a beat. His next question, however, causes me to skip a breath.

"Are you the Swan Girl?"

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I can hardly believe what she has been trying to tell me. Disbelief, hope, and empathy rage within me--a writhing, twisting knot of emotions. Is she cursed, as well? What kind of curse? Does she disappear at a certain time? Die at a certain age? Does she turn into an animal? A monster? A man?!? The dreadful possibilities are endless, and my mind spins in ever-tightening circles, trying to gather up the threads of the story to weave them into some sort of comprehensible ribbon of fact.

This is getting me no where, I realize, so I turn my attention back to Kaji. I'm acutely aware of her wide, gold-flecked eyes, staring up at me with a strange mix of defiance and apprehension, as if afraid I will challenge whatever answer she chooses to give. The question was spoken without thinking. I was just so shocked to hear her tale of a cursed maiden--it hit so close to home, and obviously has personal meaning to her. But personal in what way? I'm burning with curiosity, but deem it best to go gently.

"I know that you cannot possibly be the original Swan Girl, but what I meant to ask is if the curse it true? And if it is, are you involved in it?" Not quite as subtle as I normally am, but I suddenly feel we don't have enough time for the niceties. A cold chill creeps down my spine, and the realty of where we are, and at whose mercy, returns to the forefront with a rush. Time may be of the essence, especially considering Akito will be taking some sort of revenge on the fire-haired beauty for her apparent escape attempt.

Her lashes flutter shut, and a look of profound pain crossing her delicate features. Without opening her eyes, she begins to speak in a strained, strangely monotone voice, as if the words are being pulled from somewhere deep within, against her will.

"The curse of the Swan Girl is not one I bear," I somehow get the impression she wishes she did, though. I cannot imagine anyone wanting to be cursed, "but it is still my burden."

"If you don't actually bear the curse, then how can it be your burden?"

"For years after the war that destroyed the small kingdom, an impoverished nobleman escaped the devastated land. He never stopped at one place for more than a few days, always setting off once the sun rose, but camping before the sun had set. Always wandering. He was searching for someone.

"He had no possessions except for traveling necessities, a horse, and a large cage with a beautiful, exotic-looking bird inside." She pauses and takes a deep, fortifying breath, then she opens her eyes and locks them onto mine. I can feel the weight of her pain and sorrow. "A swan, with feathers the color of sunlight and eyes blue as a summer sky."

"The Swan Girl," I breathe. Stunning as the revelation is, I can easily accept it; hell, I can even relate. All the Juunishi have strange coloring, but the difference here is we take after our animal forms, not our animal forms taking after our human traits. I go over the bits and pieces of the story she has told me, picking over the details to flesh out the particulars of this swan curse. "So, the Swan Girl was cursed by the evil king's sorcerer, and she was transformed into a golden swan." Something clicks into place. "'Her daughters and her daughter's daughter's...' So this curse is hereditary, like the Souma curse?"

It is a statement more than a question, and she confirms it with a nod. Her head drops, fiery hair swinging forward to shield her expression from me, but I can see the tension wracking her slender shoulders. This isn't the whole of it, then.

"But, if it's hereditary, and you don't carry the curse, then how are you burdened with it?"

"My older sister is the one cursed. It is passed from generation to generation through the eldest daughter. However, while I do not transform into a swan, I bear a curse of my own, one my family took on willingly almost two centuries ago." The bitterness in her voice is a living thing, sucking out all gentle inflection, making her words dry and lifeless--hopeless. "I posses the power to nullify, or even break, curses," again a pause filled with rancor and pain, "all except the curse of the Swan Girl."

I sit before her, completely, mind-numbingly speechless. It's not that I'm so surprised that the words forming in my mind won't leave my mouth; I don't even have any words in my mind right now. Time seems to stand still for endless moments as the meaning of her words, in all their infinite variations, slowly sinks in to my blank brain. Sound is gone; I don't even feel her hand in mine--my existence and awareness have narrowed to one single, shimmering point: the hope she suddenly represents. With a sucking rush, sound and movement resume. I can hear my heartbeat pounding in my ears, beating out my excitement in a pulsing rhythm.

"Y-you--", my throat is dry, parched, and I have to swallow before continuing, "you can break the Juunishi curse?" I can hear the desperate hope coating the words, underlining and underscoring my own intense vulnerabilities. I sound like a child, long denied the comfort of a parent, being suddenly told mommy and daddy are coming home. Hell, I am that child; we all are. I can hardly dare to dream, but Tohru taught me how, and I find myself unable to stop, unable and maybe unwilling to hide behind the defensive barrier I built long ago to protect me from broken dreams.

She drops her gaze from mine, as if the sight of my pleading face is somehow painful to her. The flash of hope, born so swiftly, shatters and dies. I should be used to it by now, but I feel crushing disappointment hit me like a fist in the gut, forcing the air from my lungs in a sharp, hurtful release; the death knell of that fleeting joy. 'I should know better by now than to harbor false hope.' I think bitterly, but I can't seem to stop grasping at the fragile threads her abilities seemed to offer. And she can hold me...

"I don't know if I can break the Juunishi curse, but I can bypass it." She clarifies, enunciating clearly, just in case I may misinterpret her words. Looking at me closely, she sighs a little, then lifts our joined hands so the entwined fingers are visible to us both. "All living things are connected by an invisible force, an energy that creates, sustains, and destroys life in an endless cycle. This life force ties us to one another, and to the world, uniting all separate entities into one loose but cohesive whole." She flexes her fingers between mine, drawing away until we are barely touching, then resettling the digits closer and squeezes so our palms touch. In response, I squeeze her hand back, pressing her palm flat to mine, bringing it as close as I can.

"There are those who can sense, see, and even manipulate that life force, like I just manipulated our hands. I cannot directly control how you move your hand, but by moving mine in certain ways, I can influence how you react. When I squeezed your hand, you returned the gesture--do you see?" Well, the hand-squeezing thing I could grasp, but it was difficult to apply it to the concept of a life force-energy-thing. But, I get the general idea: she can't directly influence this energy, but she can persuade it. So I nod my head briefly, knowing that confusion still reigns, but needing to move on to more personally pertinent details. She seems to understand my impatience and continues.

"Everyone has an aura--a separate, distinct, and unique halo of energy emitted by the life force permeating their body, like the corona of the sun is the result of the atomic energy at its core. Everyone's signature is different, and reacts with the people and things around them, like when you feel someone watching you without actually seeing them watch you; your aura is reacting to that bit of their aura directed at you--", she sighed, frustrated, "I'm not explaining this well. It's so terribly complicated, and I don't even fully understand what it is I do, I just know that I can do it--like an instinct." She pauses, pursing her lips lightly, thinking of a better way to explain her talents. "This is getting us nowhere," she growls, clearly at a loss what to say.

"I accept that you can do what you do--after all, I saw you pitch a ball of blue fire through a shoji." I let a bit of my awe creep into my voice, an unspoken compliment.

She blushes a little, a faint look of sheepishness coming across her face. Pink tints her high cheeks a delicate rose, and she ducks her head, muttering apologetically, "Yeah, sorry about that whole mistaking you for Akito thing." Instantly, I'm charmed all over again by her. What a magical creature, at once seemingly made of sunlight and fresh air, yet also of moonlight and starshine. I grasp her chin and tilt her head up, leaning in to briefly rub her nose with mine.

"It's alright," I chuckle, remembering the look on Akito's face as that burning fireball sizzled past his ear. I hope it singed off some of his hair. "I wouldn't have missed seeing you attack Akito for the world." Giving an answering smile, I can see her guilt drain away. Her eyes glitter with more green as she grows more comfortable again. Before I lose myself in those changeable eyes again--and do something like ravish those lush lips, I try to bring the conversation back to a more productive track. "But what did you to me so that I don't transform when--", I halt the words, the husky note creeping into them uncharacteristic and revealing, "when we...touch."

She pulls her hand away from mine and settles it on my chest, over my heart. I desperately try to thrust down the electric tingle her touch invokes.

"All curses have a trigger--something that sets it off, like a hidden button on a booby-trap. They are not always immediately recognizable, and for the more complex curses, it can be almost impossible to locate the trigger, but somewhere in the affected person's energy is the switch. It is a disturbance, visible to one looking for it, and can usually be smoothed over--like painting over a blemish on a wall. If you can find the seed of the curse--the place from which the curse is activated, usually deep within the body--it may even be possible to remove the seed completely, negating the trigger and breaking the curse permanently. A kind of spiritual surgery, like a doctor excising a cancerous tumor." A wry twist of her lips follows this explanation.

I look down to where her warm hand is still resting over my heart, her fingers long and tapered, skin so translucent I can see the delicate tracery of blue veins just beneath the surface. I marvel at how such fragile-looking hands wield such incredible power, at how she has gifted me with something I have only been able to dream about, in my most secret heart. The gift of human touch. I cover her fingers with mine, soaking up the heat of the smooth skin, just drinking in her beauty, her generosity, her warmth of spirit. I have been blessed twice with women who have healed me, each in their own unique, profound way.

"This is where your trigger is," she glances at our hands on my chest, "where the trigger for all those cursed as you are resides."

"How do you know the others' triggers are over their hearts?", I ask. Has she met any of the others? I feel a spurt of fierce, molten heat in my chest. 'Jealous?' I want to be the only one she has touched so far, the only one she has saved-- her first. I had to share Tohru, though she freely gave her comfort to all and took great joy in that, I still resented that I couldn't keep her all to myself. I want Kaji to belong only to me, though I know I do not have that right. I have touched her in ways I only dreamed about and longed for with Tohru. As a man touches a woman. 'Mine.' Some basic, primal part of me growls fiercely, greedily. Possessively.

"Akito allowed Hatori-san to tend to me after...", her voice trailed off, sharp fragments of remembered pain flash through her eyes. 'After Akito beat me.' was the unfinished thought. I feel my free hand ball into an angry fist, and a wave of protectiveness washes through me. I vow I will not allow anyone to hurt her again; I've done all I can to protect Tohru; now I will protect Kaji. "Well, anyway, I met him, and his trigger is the same as yours. Therefore, law of averages and all, I assume it is identical for you all."

"Wait--", I suddenly exclaim, "Hatori knows you are here?!?" Rage bubbles in me, and a sense of betrayal; Hatori had known Akito was keeping someone else here, and he never once mentioned it to me. I don't know what I think he should have done--we are all pretty much helpless before out 'god' as long as he holds our souls--but the feeling is still there. "How long have you been here? Why are you here? What does Akito have over you to keep you?" I realize these are the questions I should have been asking all along, from the beginning. Instead, I focused solely on my own selfish need for explanations of how she 'fixed' me, what she could do for me, rather than how I can help her. Shame washes through me, and renewed gratitude for her generosity of spirit in the face of her own plight.

Her narrow shoulders tense again, lips pressing together in a firm line of anger, betrayal and pain. I can see fresh tears shimmering in her eyes, now gone almost black with anguish, as my pointed questions drive her continuing peril to the forefront of her awareness again.

Tugging her around so her back is to me, I pull her into the circle of my arms, settling her against my chest and resting my cheek on her hair. "You don't have to tell me if it's too painful, but I would really like to know. I want to help you," I tighten my arms around her a bit in a gentle hug, "as you have helped me." I feel her take a breath, preparing to say something, no doubt protesting my words. It's funny how I know this without seeing her face; it's something Tohru would have done, I think, and that's why I know. So I squeeze her a little tighter, silencing her words, "Please, just tell me. You don't have to go into detail if you don't want to. Just the bare necessities is okay."

Her head dips, silky hair slipping past my skin with the movement. I can't resist taking some of the soft strands between my fingers and rubbing, reveling in the smooth, cool glide. As I patiently wait for her to begin, I continue toying with the fiery locks, fascinated at how they seem to cling to me, as if seeking out my touch, craving it as much as I crave hers. Threads of copper fire twine around the paleness of my fingers, and I find myself aching for the sight and feel of the erotic contrast in textures and color against other parts of my skin. She shifts a little, and I bite back a groan at the unconscious, unutterably frustrating friction she creates. I pray desperately for patience, for distraction, before I do something...a feral grin curves my lips...wicked. 'Oh, gods, help me...' Miracle of miracles, someone finally answers my prayers: she begins to speak.

'Hallejuha...I think.'