Fruits Basket Fan Fiction ❯ History, Like Love ❯ Love Takes Hostages ( Chapter 1 )

[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]

**********
"History, Like Love"
a Fruits Basket fanfic by Ysabet MacFarlane (ba087@chebucto.ns.ca)

Chapter One: "Love Takes Hostages" [1/6]

The following story splits off from Fruits Basket manga canon towards the end of
chapter 105, and contains spoilers through chapter 106 / vol. 18.

**********
"Our history is just in our blood
And history like love is never enough

And soon enough soon enough
This will all be a memory
And soon enough soon enough
This will fade like the photograph
Of you and me"
--Tom McRae, "Human Remains" (Just Like Blood)
**********

It's not the screaming that makes him turn back, in the end. The bond itself
burns under his skin, a liquid heat in his belly, at the base of his skull,
under his ribs. 'In our blood' is the explanation they grow up mouthing, stupid
broken words explaining nothing of the way it lies inside their bones, nestled
around their organs and in their brains like a silent cancer. Akito's cries are
nothing more than a distorted reflection of what the spirit inside him already
feels: a deep, half-sick ache like physical desire stoked to desperation and
left unsated.

He hesitates a moment too long, remembering Akito's hands on his, the idyllic
peace of being in his god's presence, before--*Rin,* he whispers to himself,
clinging to the memory of her soft breathing as she slept in his arms, the
pliant warmth of her body, the way she-- A wave of nausea crashes over him, a
need to purge himself of the guilt distorting his thoughts; for one insane
moment, he imagines clawing into his own chest to release it.

One step back toward his god is enough to hint at easing the crushing pressure.
The bond whispers reassuring promises, of sunlight and _innocence_ if he'll only
return to the spot he was born to fill.

Innocence. He takes another step.

"Hatsuharu--" Kureno's hand on his shoulder is an alien weight, something so
wholly outside his experience that there is nothing to do but recoil, averting
his eyes. The human, thinking part of him knows that he exchanged words with
Kureno only minutes ago, but his instincts, already afire from his god's sobbing
anguish, recognize nothing but wrongness in the touch.

"Move." Speaking is as awkward as the first attempt at talking after a
no-holds-barred punch in the mouth.

"This isn't your whole world." The words slide around the inside of his skull,
senseless as birdsong. "Hatsuharu!" Hands on both shoulders now, shaking him,
as if Akito weren't still shrieking his name loudly enough to make the walls and
the yard echo with it. He imagines the sound of his name caught forever, a
piece of himself entombed in his god's voice, and he laughs at the thought.

There is another name in Kureno's words, too, bittersweet and beloved and so
sharp that Haru finally looks up, half-expecting it to have cut the older man's
tongue to bloody shreds. *Isuzu.*

He wrenches away from it, and Kureno lets him go. On the threshold he hesitates
again, until Akito looks up; their eyes meet, and Haru murmurs a prayer, too
faint for anyone to hear. The threats he made only minutes ago might have come
from someone else entirely; where he had offered death, he now asks for it, a
soft litany that continues until he is kneeling beside the crumpled figure on
the floor.

Akito's hand on his head is trembling and tender. The touch of god eases the
weight of his guilt, but there is no mercy in it, for either of them.

Haru closes his eyes and listens to Kureno's retreating footsteps, and tries to
forget how to breathe.

**********

In the end it all came down to walls and windows with unchanging views. From
the Cat's room, the view was an isolated rock garden that required no tending
beyond an occasional cursory weeding. Rin remembered each stone in it, from
every angle visible from inside. No books, no clocks, no light beyond what came
in through the window. No human voices reaching her ears other than occasional,
fragmented syllables the wind brought her as people wended their way through the
parts of the compound intended for habitation. Nothing to do but sleep and
stare at the stones, feeling her own voice rusting and her bones slipping closer
to the surface.

The hospital was much the same, although the voices from the hall were louder,
and the view from her bed was only a sliver of blue sky. And she was never
alone, instead of always. When she woke from her dream of lying on pavement,
watching the ever-changing panorama of the street, there was a chair by the door
and someone sitting in it. Sometimes it was Hatori watching her; sometimes a
nurse.

They tried to talk to her, but her voice was gone; it returned only when they
put the needle back into her arm and she screamed, trying to wake herself from
the nightmare.

Days passed, slowly lengthening as spring came into its own, and she never asked
where she was, no matter how badly the lines blurred between light and dark
walls, between stones and sky.

**********

He doesn't go back to school. Akito makes the arrangements, and a tutor comes
armed with books; Haru does the readings and answers the questions, glad to have
something to occupy his mind.

After a week, Yuki comes to visit him while Akito is away tending to family
business. The conversation is almost normal, tainted only by the strain around
Yuki's eyes while he tries and fails to comprehend Haru's decision to stay where
he is. Haru tries to explain, once, but Yuki has spent too much of his life
dreaming of the world's vastness to understand that so much freedom is only that
much more opportunity to cut people open and lose them before the bleeding can
be staunched.

He reads to pass the time, and plays video games once his father brings some of
his things, and endures Akito's touch during evening visits that last for a
handful of minutes or hours. Against his will he comes to anticipate it: the
cool feel of fingers in his hair, lips brushing his cheek in whispers, hands
stroking his back and arms. Being touched means that he is still safe, not
alone, not condemned.

**********

"Isuzu."

Hatori sighed and leaned back in the unyielding chair, steepling his fingers
while he stared at the unresponsive girl sitting opposite him. He'd thought it
might be one of her good days when he first entered the room and found her
looking at him. On Akito's orders, he was the only one of the family to visit
her regularly, and even that concession had taken a fair bit of persuasion and
reiteration of just what his responsibilities as the family doctor meant.

After a few weeks of 'treatment', she sometimes spoke to the nurses who brought
her food and took her out into the garden. Hatori was privately skeptical of
the practice of treating such a profound withdrawal from the world by
encouraging meditation, but he was no psychiatrist. The nurses insisted on
taking her occasional small conversations as a positive sign, but he watched the
tapes and disagreed. Isuzu's voice was soft when she answered their questions,
and in her eyes he saw the determined look of a child continuing to talk to
imaginary playmates long past her grudging realization that they existed only in
her mind.

"Isuzu."

Her responses to him were different: she presented him with a silence so
complete he might have thought she'd succumbed to the selective mutism that
occasionally cropped up among the younger Jyuunishi, if not for the tapes... and
if not for her occasional flares of temper when he figured out how to push her
buttons.

It was enough to make him wish Shigure were permitted to see her--if ever there
was a use for his gift of antagonism, this was it. As it was, almost every
reaction Hatori had gotten out of her was a response to something Shigure had
suggested. Even so, nothing reached her for longer than a few minutes; the
world she'd been born into had spent her lifetime rejecting her, and she showed
every sign of turning the tables on it.

"Isuzu?"

No reply.

**********

Haru keeps count of the days and weeks as they go by; when summer comes, he goes
outside more and more often, studying in the gardens, returning to Akito's home
at dusk. Life goes on as usual in the Main House, and he passes through it with
as little effect as a ghost. Servants and uncursed family members alike know
better than to interfere with a Jyuunishi when Akito's will is so strong. They
nod to him as they pass, murmuring "Hatsuharu-sama" under their breath, never
looking into his eyes, the eyes of someone born to love the god of the zodiac.
As long as his every action is devoted to Akito, there is no room to do anything
else.

The other Jyuunishi are another matter.

Yuki is seen more often in the compound than he has been since he moved out;
Haru hears the servants commenting on it, as if they believe his new closeness
to Akito has deafened him. The older boy rarely spends long stretches of time
with him, but there are at least a few minutes every day or two--light touches
framed by awkward, worried smiles that never reach Yuki's eyes.

Kisa slips into the house one day after school, bravely shoving fear down under
quiet formality. The worry on her face makes him want to hug her as he used to,
to ruffle her hair and try to make her smile, but he feels Akito's gaze on him
and doesn't dare touch her. It's the only time she visits him, and he's almost
grateful for it.

Hiro, when he comes, says almost nothing. The betrayal in his eyes speaks
volumes, a silent cry of rage that ends in an unmistakable accusation thrown
over his shoulder as he goes:

"Rin's not coming back."

Haru stays outside for the whole night afterwards, lying on his back in the
grass, gazing blindly up at the stars until the tears stop. In the morning,
Hatori comes to retrieve him, and they stare at each other for a long, frozen
moment. The resentment that wells up in Haru's chest is the most intense thing
he's felt in weeks; it burns against the dawn chill, and lasts until he watches
Hatori glance at the sunrise, and sees the way the doctor's left eye barely
squints against the glare.

Shigure and Hatori are the people he sees most, after Akito. Shigure alone acts
as if everything is normal, keeping up a flow of casual conversation and
demonstrating a remarkable knowledge of the gossip at Kaibara High. From him,
Haru hears some of the wild theories that went around the student body when his
class finally realized that he wasn't returning. Shigure passes them all on
with the same amused look--all but one. Instead, he watches the ceiling while
he relays the rumor that Haru had dropped out to live with his older lover, and
there is a soft edge when he adds, "Young people these days, and their ideas,
hmm, Ha-kun?"

Kureno comes by Akito's house every day, but Akito has forbidden them to speak
to each other, and Haru is as glad of it as he is of anything. Sometimes Kureno
watches him from the doorway, and Haru lets his face--his eyes, his mind--empty
until he is alone again.

**********

In midsummer, a nurse met Hatori at the door with a hint of anxiety leaking
through her professional demeanor. "We're worried about her, Dr. Sohma."
Hatori made an attempt at polite, reassuring noises, and fooled neither of them.

Isuzu was lying down when he went into her room, staring out the window at the
clouds. Hatori pulled up a chair by the bed, bracing himself for another
unproductive visit; it had been a month since she'd spoken a word to him.

"Isuzu."

Her head turned slowly, until she was meeting his eyes. Her face was deathly
pale, framed by the shoulder-length hair fanned out on the pillow. The only
trace of color was the pink flash when she licked her lips. "'s strange seeing
a man, Tori-nii." Her voice was steadier than he'd expected, and so devoid of
emotion that a chill went down his spine.

"Are you still eating?" The question came without thinking; her weight had been
fluctuating severely since her admission. When he'd found her on the street the
day after her release from the Cat's room, after she'd fled the hospital, there
had been an orderly line of scratches across her stomach. It was one of the
only things she'd explained, during a responsive moment: eight scratches, the
oldest so faint it might have gone unnoticed without the others. One for each
day she hadn't eaten before Kureno found her, a silent tally kept with skin and
fingernails in the absence of any other tools, a way to give herself some idea
of how much longer she might live.

"Enough." She was still looking at him, with eyes so dull that he almost wished
she was still silent and blank. "Enough to live," she added, as if his failure
to reply meant he needed clarification.

"Enough to keep your body alive." Her shoulders moved in minute confirmation
before she lifted her arms, tracing a fingertip over the too-visible veins.

"That's all that's needed." A faint sigh escaped her as she dropped her arms
again. "Akito... Akito didn't mind if I died, before."

"And now?" He didn't ask how she knew, or wonder whether she was imagining
things. The terrible stillness of her face couldn't conceal the banked fires of
the bond, the demands it made on her even after human needs had been abandoned.

Thin fingers touched the bones of her sternum. "I can't." She turned away,
back towards the window, and bitterness blossomed in her voice. "I can't even
_die_."

**********

The dream doesn't quite wake him. He lies inside it, half-aware that he is
outside the real world, watching the pulsing of the blood-web passing through
his skin. The steady beat of his heart moves it in and out of him, through a
million invisible gates--smaller than pores, smaller than molecules, an
inexorable movement of blood flowing through him and out of him and down
pathways where other hearts take up the rhythm. Sooner or later the blood
escaping him returns, moving through his body, carrying whispers and sighs from
the others who share it with him.

Haru tries to count the separate hearts, to distinguish voices among the harmony
in his mind, and fails. He thinks, dimly, that once it was easier, that the web
was brighter, the work and communion differently balanced. And because he is
looking, he feels the sudden spark and interruption; the distant cry that
filters back to him is too faint to interpret, but his heart lurches for a
moment as the act of beating becomes more of a strain.

*She's gone.*

He wakes to the taste of blood and the sound of Akito's ragged breathing,
audible from where his god sits by the window on the other side of the room.
"Akito?" It hurts to speak; he probes his mouth with his tongue and finds that
he's bitten the soft inside of his cheek.

Akito stands, face hidden by the darkness, and comes to kneel beside him.
"You'll stay here." *Forever* is the silent ending to the sentence, too weighty
and important to be trusted to mere speech, and Haru finds himself nodding.
Akito's palm brushes his hair back, and then a thumb rubs at his cheekbone,
smearing tears. "None of us will ever be alone," Akito says, before going to
the door and leaving Haru alone with the tremulous echo of the words.

He curls up on his side, shivering against the heat and humidity, listening
without paying much attention to Akito's one-sided conversation down the
hallway.

"What--I don't care. Just..." The words drift in and out of his awareness.
"Just--Hatori, just deal with..." Akito's voice rises with an emotion Haru
can't identify, falls again. "...arrangements... what money's _for_, isn't
it...?"

*This is important.* Against his will, he begins to listen, straining to
overcome months of lethargy, unable to determine why. *She's gone.* A whisper
in his head, fragment of a dream, fragrant with the taste of blood.

"...just make her go away," Akito says, something cracking in the words, running
deeper than Haru can follow. The heavy sound of the phone slammed into its
cradle ends the conversation.

Haru falls asleep waiting for Akito to return, and is still alone when he wakes
again, with no memory of further dreams.

**********
"sit in the chair and be good now
yes, I know
screams, screams
sit there and then everything
everything, everybody else's girl
maybe one day she'll be her own"
--Tori Amos, "Girl" (live improv.) (Little Earthquakes)
**********

Rin kept her eyes closed when the door opened, all of her attention focused on
breathing steadily. Opening her eyes meant letting the world in, which meant
tears she was no longer able to control; the nurses brought her water as often
as she asked for it, but it wasn't enough to banish the dehydration headache.

A chair scraped along the floor, pulling up next to the bed. "Isuzu."

Hatori's voice startled her into looking at him, and she swore under her breath
as a sob caught her. "Tori-nii." It was wrong, _unnatural_, to not know it was
him just from the feel of his presence, not if he wasn't trying to hide from
her. The Horse had left her in the night, with no warning, left her gutted and
empty and so alone that she didn't dare relax or sleep for fear of screaming.

*Being human means being lonely,* Kureno had said that morning, when he appeared
with no warning, his gaze full of a wretched understanding as he spoke to her
for the first time since she was a child. 'Human', he'd said, as if the word
had never applied to her before, and 'uncursed', naming the blessing that felt
like it might kill her, and 'I'm sorry', words that she couldn't remember anyone
ever saying to her before, not with that grief and weight of personal
responsibility. *I tried to stop him, Isuzu.* And something else, some final
part of herself, shattered. *He tried. He loves you, but he...*

*It happened to me when I was a few years younger than you,* he had whispered in
her ear as he held her, as she wept, unable to control herself enough to stop
crying or to push him away. Her laughter had surprised them both, a sound that
made her want to cover her ears to stop it. Uncursed. Both of them uncursed,
and there was no rhyme or reason to it, nothing at all.

Her inability to regain control eventually had the room full of nurses,
strangers who knew nothing, who stared at her with professional worry. Kureno
stayed between her and them, ordering them not to sedate her until Hatori
arrived and approved it.

*Dr. Sohma's not scheduled to see her until the weekend,* came the protests, and
Kureno's grim response planted the first seed of true terror in her heart.

*He'll be here.*

Only a few hours later, Hatori was gazing at her, face shuttered and unreadable.
"Tori-nii?" Tears welled up before he could answer, despite her efforts at
blinking them back, and he reached out to touch her as he had during his last
visit, one hand resting on her forehead.

"You'll be all right," he said quietly, watching while she trembled. "You
will."

Rin tried to say his name again as he stood, but the sobs were too thick in her
throat, choking her.

She was still weeping, curled on her side, when a nurse came in to give her a
sleeping pill--"Just a little, dear, just enough to make you rest"--and she took
it without protest for the first time, desperate for the pain in her head and
her eyes and her chest to ease. "It's good news today," the nurse continued,
wiping her face with an exquisitely cool cloth while the drug slowly began to
take effect. "Dr. Sohma says he knows of an alternative treatment that will
help you."

Evidently the nurse had told the truth about the pill's low dosage--it wasn't
enough to blur Rin's moment of comprehension, or stop the screams that spilled
out of her mouth. They kept coming while her mind chanted desperately about
escape, until there were more hands on her arms, holding her down until the
prick of a needle in her arm heralded a fog of nothingness as deep as any dream.

**********

Kureno is waiting for him when he steps outside. Haru freezes, a chill running
down his arms despite the oppressive heat of the evening. "Hatsuharu--"

"No." He welcomes the dizziness that washes over him, even though he has long
since learned that its arrival is a forerunner for violent nausea if he
continues trying to think through it.

"Are you going to live the rest of your life like this?" There may be anger
behind the words; Kureno is too soft-spoken for Haru to be sure.

"I--Akito doesn't want me talking to you."

"Why are you pretending you don't have a choice?" Haru leans back against the
door, struck by the sudden blaze of emotion in the older man's eyes. "You've
been cursed and resisting it since you were born, all of you children..."

"Didn't you?" Haru hears himself asking, torn between the urge to flee and the
sudden spark of curiosity.

Kureno smiles faintly, and there is such tenderness on his face that Haru almost
turns to avoid it. "We knew what it was like to live without a god binding our
souls. Akito was our blessing." His voice shakes. "And now you're using that
bond to destroy yourself, doing nothing but hurting yourself and Akito, while--"

"I don't deserve anything else!" Before he can do more than try to catch his
breath through the pool of queasiness in his guts, there are cool hands on his
shoulders, and Kureno is saying Akito's name.

"Go inside," Akito says flatly. Haru obeys without looking back, not wanting to
half-overhear yet another of their arguments, with Akito's flaring anger and
Kureno's soft refusal to back down or truly fight back.

He's barely had time to open a window on the other side of the house, taking
deep breaths of the evening air, when Akito comes up behind him. "Kureno will
be doing his work from his own house for a while."

Haru turns in surprise. "But--" Kureno is a fixture in Akito's large house,
his voice a familiar sound as he deals with the maids and the traffic of
visitors from among the family.

Akito looks up at him then, eyes wide and haunted, and Haru's heart turns over,
remembering the dream that haunted him well into the day. A steady flow of
blood, painfully redirected, and the salt of tears, a sad substitute for the
metallic scent and rhythm that binds them together. "There are things Kureno
doesn't understand as well as he used to."

**********
"he's gonna change my name
maybe you'll leave the light on..."
--Tori Amos, "Mother" (Little Earthquakes)
**********

The following morning, when Hatori returned, Isuzu was sedated past the point of
coherence. One of the nurses hurried to keep up with his strides as he walked
down the hall, trying to fill him in. "Every time the drugs wore off at all,
she just started screaming again, Dr. Sohma--we kept the tapes running, as you
instructed, but--"

"Did she say anything?"

The nurse shook her head. "Nothing that made any sense, no."

At the door to Isuzu's room, Hatori paused before opening it. "I'll be
administering the treatment now, and turning the tapes off. Effective
immediately, she is to be discharged into my personal care."

"Should her medical records be transferred to your home office?"

Hatori considered the increasing tensions between the factions among the Main
House's residents and servants. "Keep them here for now. Under no
circumstances are they to be viewed without my express permission."

"Yes, Doctor." The nurse bowed quickly and stepped back as Hatori entered the
room, locking the door behind him.

A quick glance at the bed revealed that Isuzu was lying on her back, her eyes
half-open. The position looked unnatural, after months of seeing her curled
into a tight ball to sleep. Hatori grimaced and switched off the recorders,
fitting the lens cap on the camera as an extra precaution before he closed the
blinds on the windows.

Isuzu offered no resistance when he gripped her shoulders and moved her into a
sitting position, leaning her against the head of the bed. Her eyes opened the
rest of the way, dull and unfocused. Hatori said her name quietly, snapping his
fingers to measure her level of responsiveness. She flinched at the noise, lips
parting slightly.

"...Tori-nii?" The name came with an obvious effort, and he sat still for a
long moment, just looking at her.

The fact that she was still beautiful was an impressive testament to their
blood. Sohma women tended not to have the fragile features that worked well
with extreme paleness and thinness, and Isuzu was very obviously ill, offering
him a much clearer look at the perfection of her bones than he ever wanted to
see again. He kept his eyes on hers while he slowly immersed himself in the
pattern of memory, visualizing the network that symbolized the human ability to
make connections. Silently, he reminded himself of the roots that needed to be
suppressed; with the vital points lost to her, her mind would naturally shut
down the pathways to the memories that relied on them.

The curse itself, Akito had said. Her medical history. Her parents' abuse.
Honda Tohru. Hatsuharu.

*What will be left?* he had asked, and Akito's voice shook on the other end of
the line.

*What--I don't care. Just send her away when you're done. She won't even know
the difference, will she? Just--Hatori, just deal with it...*

Isuzu's eyes widened as he covered them with one hand, slipping the other behind
her head to keep her from thrashing too hard. He hadn't touched anyone's
memories since Kana's.

Where Kana had submitted to his touch, Isuzu made a weak effort to pull away.
"No--"

The whisper hung in the air while he remembered the broken, exhausted way she
had cried. "It won't hurt anymore," he murmured back, holding the key points of
her memory in his mind's eye. "It won't hurt." And he reached out, as his
father had taught him, and said things that twisted something intangible in her.
A slow convulsion ran through her body as her brain fought to protect itself
from the violation, and then she lay still in his hands.

The hardest part of learning this, his father had said once, is realizing how
simple it is. How quickly a person's mind can be turned against itself. How
little you have to do to trigger self-destruction.

Hatori lowered her carefully, calculating how long she would be unconscious
while her mind rewrote itself. Long enough--there was no way it could not be
long enough--for him to sit and wait for his own memories to subside before he
called the Main House and set the next stage of her life in motion.

**********

Autumn comes before Haru hears Kureno's voice again. The long days of summer
are just beginning to wind down, coolness seeping through the windows as soon as
the sun disappears behind the trees, instead of hours past dusk. Around him,
the house is empty; after a quiet day, Akito has dismissed the servants earlier
than usual, and gone out into the gardens. Haru walks through the halls
silently, dragging one hand lightly along the wall.

True solitude is a rarity, and he finds himself savoring even a few minutes
without the servants hovering or Akito touching him. His god's hands have
become intimately familiar, light and possessive on the back of his neck, his
shoulders, his thighs. Sometimes days go by without another human voice
addressing him directly, often enough that Akito becomes his world, with
occasional glimpses of the house and gardens, and everything beyond them reduced
to a dream.

Kureno's voice in the garden startles him--it takes Haru a moment to identify
him, and then Akito answers in a tone that is clearly not meant to be overheard.
"We are not discussing this."

"Whether you want to or not, Akito, we--"

"Why are you insisting on this? It's _done_, and I told you not to come near
him--"

"I'm not talking to Hatsuharu. I'm talking to you." Haru leans against the
wall, slowly slides down to sit back on his heels. "It's not 'done' as long as
he doesn't know what Isuzu--" The wordless exclamation of anger that escapes
Akito sends chills down his spine. "After everything, you can listen to her
name!" Kureno hesitates, but Akito says nothing. "I talked to her before
Hatori-niisan got to her. And if you plan to keep Hatsuharu trapped here for
the rest of his life to make up for Isuzu, he's entitled to know what she told
me."

"Losing her was no loss. There's no connection between that and his presence
here."

"Akito." The sudden gentleness in Kureno's voice warms the air. "Akito, I know
you've always been attached to him, but I also know he's all you have left of
her." A breeze stirs up the leaves of the garden, making it harder to hear.
Haru shifts uncomfortably, keenly aware of his transgression. "...really have
done it?" Kureno is asking, and Haru begins to get up again. "Would you have
blinded him if she hadn't obeyed you?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"You do know," Kureno says quietly, each word made more terrible by his calm.
"You threatened to blind him. Twice. She told me."

"That girl--" the venom is blistering "--is a slut and a liar."

"She's slept with fewer people than you have." By contrast, Kureno's voice is
almost unnaturally even. "She may be a liar, but she had nothing to lose when
she was talking to me. She had plenty to lose when she lied to you."

"When she--"

"Did you know she was lying when she confessed to seducing him?"

The scene comes to life in Haru's mind: the way Rin's eyes could harden with
determination, a preemptive barrier when her mind was made up and she expected
him to challenge her. *Rin can be hurtful, but she won't lie to protect
herself.* His own words, echoing back from a long-ago conversation with Yuki.
*But to protect me...*

He is barely aware that he's moving, almost running out of earshot, back to
'his' room at the back of the house, a room that Akito enters and leaves as
freely as he does. For a moment he looks around wildly, trying to imagine never
stepping outside it again. Kneeling on the bare floor, he presses his hands
against his head in a futile attempt at slowing or stopping the flood of
thoughts. Rin resisting when he kissed her outside Shigure's house, and the
faint sound she made when she stopped fighting and melted into his arms, her
mouth's lies giving way to her body's honesty.

The soft swish of the door sliding open behind him alerts him to Akito's
presence, but he can't find the energy to turn.

"You heard?" There is a strange undercurrent to the question, an unfamiliar
vulnerability.

"Is it true? That you--" Haru gags on the words, tastes acid when he coughs.
"You used me to control her?"

"That's hardly--"

"You hurt her because I loved her, but she let you because she loved me."

"Hatsuharu..."

"Is--it--TRUE?" He almost screams it, his body's instinctive submission
overcome by the need to look his god in the eye.

Akito stiffens, then seems to shrink, and Haru's hands clench, remembering the
feeling of that pale throat under his fingers. The silence is reply enough.

"_Do_ it, then." He tries for defiance, but all he can think of is Rin in the
hospital bed, alone in the dark to spare him from their god's wrath. "Do
whatever you want, just--let it be me this time." He stares up at Akito from
the floor, stomach twisting with a need so strong he can hardly imagine its
satisfaction. *Punish me, take the guilt away, please...*

Akito stares back, skin stained by the last colors of sunset, and takes three
slow steps toward him. Haru shuts his eyes as the distance between them closes,
and listens to the sounds of their breathing, the surge of adrenaline-driven
blood in his ears.

The world seems very, very small.

Cool hands touch his shoulders, slip up the sides of his throat to cup his face.
Fingers in his hair, thumbs pressing lightly on his eyelids. Haru shudders,
waiting; it is the moment before a piercing gun or a tattooist's needle breaks
flesh, magnified beyond recognition. "_Please_," he whispers, and the touch
moves, tracing the indentation between his eye and its socket, caressing the
bone.

"I never had any such intention," Akito murmurs, and Haru's muscles go slack,
trembling so hard he can't imagine trusting them with his weight again. Breath
tickles his face, and then he is being kissed, first his cheek, then his mouth.
"You're still mine." The words are too like the ones he and Rin always
exchanged, earnest even when playful, pleas and affirmations muted helplessly
against each other's mouths and bodies. A hand runs up his thigh,
preternaturally aware of how to touch him. "You'll always belong to me."

If there is a hint of doubt in Akito's voice, Haru barely hears it; his hands
have reached back, making his eyes fly open in surprise. "You're--"

"You've always known," Akito says softly. "Somewhere, you've all known." She
takes his hand in hers, uses his fingers to open her kimono. The body
underneath is as slight as Rin's--less of a curve to the hips, breasts smaller
under the cloth bindings--and he feels himself responding to it all, to warm
flesh and knowing hands and the security of being possessed. "I thought it
didn't matter to you," she adds, sharpness tinging her voice as she touches him
again. "You loved Yuki this way, once."

"Once," Haru echoes, distracted by the way the bond shifts between them, makes
him react to her need, the churning hunger that has little to do with desire or
a wish for pleasure. "But you know nothing ever--"

Her lips on his throat are soft and demanding. "Are you disappointed? Were you
hoping to see what it was like, doing this with another boy?"

"_Hoping_ for...?" He flinches and presses into the touch as she strokes his
face with the back of her hand. "I never even thought about anything like
this."

"Are you sure?" She kisses him before he can reply, and he shudders again,
unable to
pretend it's revulsion that makes him shake. With only her touch to satisfy his
deep need for physical contact for so long, he is excruciatingly aware of her.

He keeps his eyes squeezed shut, not resisting or returning her caresses. If
his refusal to look at her is a deterrent, it doesn't show; her hands keep
touching him slowly, everywhere, exploring bare skin. His mind demands images
to accompany the sensations, and thinking of Rin is unbearable--for one vivid
moment when Akito's touch reminds him of hers, the accompanying wave of guilt
wrenches at his stomach in spite of the way the rest of his body is still
responding.

He wonders if Akito can feel it through the bond, the way he can feel her
irresistible need to reaffirm her possession of him. And then she takes him in
her mouth, deep and sudden; irrationally, his mind calls up Kureno's reply to
her scathing denouncement of Rin. *She's slept with fewer people than you
have.*

His eyes flash open for an instant, enough to see what she's doing to him, and
he shoves the image away. Unable to think of Rin, he lets himself imagine Yuki
in a way he hasn't in years, not since he was young enough that the idea of
touching anyone was mysterious. What he imagines now is different, rendered
more vivid by his own experience. Differences of mechanics aside, skin is skin,
and kisses are kisses, all heat and hunger.

The illusion crumbles when Akito straddles him and uses her hand to guide him
inside her, but by now his body is on autopilot, aroused to the point of real
need. Haru groans at the sensation of her, lets her pull him down on top of
her. It's all instinct, a purely physical pleasure running through his bones;
he gratefully lets his thoughts slip into silence, leaving only the temporary
connection of flesh, and the eternal connection of the blood binding them
together.

He is somewhere beyond emptiness when it breaks. Exhausted by the months of
guilt and shadows, every part of him has slowly been stretched as thin as a
spider's web, and between one heartbeat and the next he _sees_ it. Only the
bond has remained the same, and as the thread binding him to Akito snaps, the
links between him and the other Jyuunishi follow, leaving him alone in a way he
can barely comprehend.

He is in his own body, only his body, and the flesh and bone that were once
constricting now hang loosely around his single, disconnected soul. The void
echoes around him for a small eternity, invisible and dark, with nothing to hold
on to. And then feeling returns like blood to a pinched limb, rushing in as
inexorably as the sea: guilt, and loss, and a rage so pure and bright that his
body's pleasure is forgotten.

He wants to scream, but there is a desperate mouth on his, words cracking under
their own dead weight. "Nonononono don't go, don't leave me, DON'T--" Fingers
claw at his back, trying to hold him in place, slipping in the sweat pouring off
him.

"Rin does that," he says, and laughs, a broken, sick sound that tastes like
bile. "Feels different, though."

Akito's arms tighten around him, refusing to let go even when he puts his hand
on her throat, and a shock runs through him as he realizes he's still physically
inside her, a useless shadow of her presence in his mind. "Don't go."

The storm building in his chest is blinding, a razor-sharp edge of emotion he
had almost forgotten. It seethes through him like lust and fire, makes him bare
his teeth against the sob that tries to escape. Akito moves under him, still
holding on, her hands on his hips in a desperate attempt to maintain the last
connection between them.

"You know what's inside me," he says, so softly that even he can barely hear the
fury shivering under the words. "You know. And you still want this?" His hand
is still on her neck, almost tender, reflecting something deeper than desire,
too dark to ever be unleashed on Rin's body. It makes his stomach turn over:
the silent awareness that he is still hard inside her, still capable of taking
pleasure from a body he wants to hurt.

Akito says nothing, nails dragging across his hipbones, and Haru repositions
himself so that their upper bodies aren't touching. When she tries to pull him
back against her, he stiffens his arms to maintain the distance, mimicking the
barrier that has always separated him from people whose minds and souls don't
touch his. Stray tears escape down his cheeks and onto her breasts, melting
into her sweat; he watches for a moment, before slowly meeting her eyes.

He holds her gaze while he thrusts into her, hard enough that her entire body
jerks; she stares back, pale and unflinching, and he moves again. And again.

**********

"That's all it is," she whispered when he finally pushed her aside. Haru turned
away from the tear stains on her face, rubbing at the salt crust on his own
cheeks.

"Not with her." He spat the words, wanting them to hurt, and Akito lifted her
head to match his glare. "Do you really think that's what I was doing with Rin?
Do you think that's what I _wanted_ with her?"

"You think it means something that she spread her legs and let you put that
inside her?" The rancor in the question made him turn away; he found his pants
and
pulled them on while she kept talking. "She's an idiot, just whoring herself to
make you--"

He stood and headed for the door, listening as the ghosts of a lifetime ago
whispered and hissed at the threshold. *I'll kill both of us.*

"You're no better than her," Akito said from behind him, and this time he
refused to glance back at the despair in her voice.

"Neither are you."

*********

The walk to his parents' house took an eternity, although the paths within the
Main House were familiar enough that not even he could get too badly lost. The
moonlight was obscenely bright, shining off the dying blossoms filling the
gardens.

Autumn.

He shivered, unable to regret leaving most of his clothes behind in the darkness
of Akito's house, half-oblivious to the attention of the servants who passed by
on their last errands of the evening. The looks and murmurs followed him, but
no one got in his way, or tried to speak to him; he found himself hating them,
the hive of people supporting the Sohmas' illusion.

He found his mother in the entryway of the house, talking on her cell phone
while she stepped into her shoes. Perfectly made-up eyes widened at the sight
of him, her mouth shaping his name; he stared at her, trying to remember how
long it had been since they'd seen each other.

After a long moment of silence, the buzz of a voice on the other end of the
phone broke through her surprise. "Sorry, no--listen, I'm not going to make it
on time. Go ahead without me." Haru walked past her into the kitchen, barely
registering her voice behind him as he poured himself a glass of water. "No, my
son--my son's just come home, he's been away, and I--right. Later, then."

She was standing in the doorway when he finished drinking, clearly at a loss.
"Haru...?"

"Do you love me?" The question surprised him as much as her; under his gaze,
she slowly blanched.

"Haru, you know I--"

"Would you have loved me more if I wasn't cursed? You've always lived 'inside',
so did you k-know what it meant?" He wasn't sure when the pleading entered his
voice, only that he couldn't banish it again. "When I was born, did you know it
meant I didn't belong to you? Did you care? That I was Akito's?" The edge of
the table was sharp under his hand, not enough to hold him up; the floor, when
he reached it, was blessedly cool. "Mom?"

"I love you," she said, closer than he'd realized--kneeling beside him,
carefully maintaining the distance they'd shared since he left her womb.
"You're my _son_, Haru--"

"I'm Jyuunishi." The word hung in the air like a curse all its own, weighted
with a lifetime of watching lives destroyed around him. "Same as Rin, and Yuki,
an' Momiji, but--" He gritted his teeth against fresh tears, trying to stay
coherent.

"I've always been Akito's, my whole life, and I tried to--to give myself to Rin,
to be hers instead, but I fucked up, I--everything broke, everything..."

"Haru, what happ--" She stopped, taking a deep breath. "What can I do?"

"Hug me," he whispered.

She stiffened in surprise. "Why do you want--"

"Be my _mother_." The words hurt coming out, a resentment that took them both
by surprise; he registered the tears on her face, but couldn't quite piece their
meaning together. "Please...?"

It wasn't as natural as he'd imagined when he was growing up; not, after all, as
if a mother instinctively knew the unique, precious way of holding her own
child. His mother's arms were awkward when they went around his shoulders,
waiting for him to transform. There was no sense of homecoming in her embrace,
and a small part of him mourned that dream as it died.

She didn't understand at first, as he shook against her, still human. "Haru?"
And then she sobbed once, a burst of pain and wonder that cut through his
misery, ever so slightly. Her arms tightened around him, holding him close:
unfamiliar fingers stroking his hair, tears on his bare shoulder. "My son."

"I fucked up," he repeated, his throat so constricted with pain that he wasn't
sure she could understand what he was saying. He swore again and again,
vicious, broken words that didn't come close to giving voice to the anguish
ripping through his chest; eventually they died away too, leaving only wracking
sobs that went for far too long, leaving the floor and his mother's
carefully-pressed dress soaked with tears and sweat.

*********

Fruits Basket is the creation of Takaya Natsuki, and is licensed in North
America by FUNimation (anime) and Tokyopop (manga). Used without permission or
the intention of making a profit. Please support the original work!

"History, Like Love" © 2006-2007 by Ysabet MacFarlane (ba087@chebucto.ns.ca).
Edited by Alishya Lane; additional beta work by Flamika (chapter one).

Comments and criticism welcomed at the above address.

This story may be reproduced and archived so long as the original text is
preserved and the author's name and contact information remain attached.
Notifying the author of any such use is an appreciated courtesy. NO CHANGES OF
ANY KIND ARE PERMITTED.

All quoted lyrics/epigraphs are the property of their copyright holders, and are
also used without permission. The title "History, Like Love" comes from the
song "Human Remains" by Tom McRae, found on the album "Just Like Blood"; this
chapter's title comes from the "Sandman" series (volume 9, "The Kindly Ones") by
Neil Gaiman.