Author's Note: This story is set ten years after the end of the anime. Of course, I don't make any claims on Fruits Basket. Thank you for reading, and please let me know what you think.
|| In the Absence of Memory ||
by mikan
Chapter One: An End to Memory
She lay motionless in the bed, her eyes fully open and fixed on the whitewashed ceiling above her head. The cool white sheet was tucked neatly under her arms, stretched taut till the foot of the bed. A length of flexible plastic tubing followed the curve of her arm like a clear, glistening snake. The moonlight seeping in through the blinds lent an even greater pallor to her skin.
The man stood at the foot of the bed, studying her silently. After a few minutes, he moved to her side. He reached into his pocket and withdrew a slim penlight. With a flick of his finger, he turned it on and shone it into her eyes.
She failed to flinch. He stared into her eyes. Her pupils were widely dilated, their depths blank and vacuous. He switched the penlight off and dropped it back into his pocket. He turned her arm up and checked the needle that ran into her vein. With gentle firmness, his fingers smoothed the tape holding the needle in place. Her skin was icy.
Slowly, he lifted her arm and tucked it under the sheet. He reached over and slipped her other arm in, then drew the covers up to her chin. His hand lingered for a moment on her cheek.
"Come back to us, Tohru."
She had been that way for almost a week now -- silent and still, her eyes always open, always glazed with the same blank dullness. Not speaking, not eating, not sleeping -- just lying there, as if caught in a paralysis of shock. They had found her crumpled in a corner of her room, her clothes filthy and her face streaked with dirt. But her eyes, even then, had been wide, staring at something beyond them, something only she could see.
What are you seeing, Tohru? What happened to you?
The door behind him slid open. He turned his head. Light burst into the darkened room from the glaring fluorescent bars that lined the ceiling of the hallway. A man stood in the doorway, his face in shadow. Hatori waited for him to close the door.
The man did. Then he paused, staring at the figure on the bed.
"Akito." Hatori's voice was completely devoid of surprise.
Akito crossed the room slowly. In the half light his face glowed starkly pale against the collar of his wool coat. He stopped at the foot of the bed, his eyes fixed on her face. He said nothing.
Hatori watched him in silence. It was the first time Akito had come to visit her.
Suddenly Akito spoke.
"What are you waiting for, Hatori?" he asked quietly. "Don't you want to save her?"
As he listened to Akito's silky voice, Hatori felt an icy uneasiness slowly begin to creep around his heart. Akito suddenly turned and looked him in the eye.
"I thought you'd know what to do by now. Haven't we been through all this before? With that girl of yours, years ago?" Akito's eyes swept over the limp body lying on the bed. "Worthless," he muttered. "Completely, utterly worthless. It must be part of the curse to have ridiculously stubborn women wanting to join the family and save us all. Honda Tohru was no different from Kana." He paused. "Or was she? Let me ask you, Hatori. Was Kana sincere? Was she honest?"
Hatori stared at Akito's harsh, pale profile.
"I'm not sure I understand... " he murmured with polite blandness.
"I mean," Akito went on softly, "when she told you, I want to be with you, did she mean it... do you think."
It was the oddest question he had ever heard Akito utter, and it gave him pause. Hatori forced himself to clear through the turmoil in his mind and really look at Akito. What he saw stunned him.
An undercurrent of emotion seemed to pulsate visibly under the stiff, hawklike cast of his face. His jaw was set, and his lips had thinned into a grim line. His eyes stood out starkly against the glowing paleness of his skin -- dark, shadowed, and hard. But brilliant all the same.
With pain, Hatori realized. Akito was struggling with a pain that he was barely managing to hide. Hatori suddenly noticed the rigidness of his body, and the clenched fingers half-hidden by the long sleeves of his coat.
"You can't ask me to do this, Akito," he finally said with quiet firmness. "You can't do this to her."
Akito's eyes flashed.
"I can't ask you to do this?" he echoed. "Well, you're right. I'm not asking. I'm telling you. Do it. And I don't mean anything of the halfway sort, Hatori. I mean everything. Take away everything."
Hatori stared at him, his eyes shot with outrage.
"There is no way --"
"How dare you disobey me," Akito hissed.
"How dare you even think of doing this to her! It's your fault she's like this!"
Akito stared at him in silence for a moment, then gave a short, brittle laugh. His hands slid smoothly back into the deep pockets of his coat.
"In all my life, Hatori, I would never have expected to hear you speak to me like this." He tilted his head slightly to the side, regarding Hatori's shadowed face thoughtfully. "Even when I hurt your eye, even when I almost tore that woman's hair out, you never said a word. And yet for this woman, you manage to say such hurtful, ungrateful things." His voice dropped to a delicate whisper. "I won't waste any more time. I shouldn't need to tell you. If you don't do it, she'll die. And if that happens... I'll never forgive you."
The whisper hung in the silence. Akito turned away from the bed and began walking towards the door.
"Akito. To take away everything... "
"You're not taking away anything she hasn't thrown away already," Akito answered, pausing at the door. "She threw away everything the moment she came to me." His eyes found Hatori's in the darkness. "I have the car ready outside. I expect that you'll have her ready as soon as possible."
"Where are you taking her?" Hatori demanded.
"Didn't I already tell you? I asked you to have the villa aired out, didn't I?."
The door slid shut behind him, closing off the light and leaving the room cloaked once more in gray darkness. Hatori forced himself to take a deep breath. Then another. And another still, until he felt the roiling fury within him begin to calm. He uncurled his fist, his palm slick with sweat. His fingernails had dug in little red crescents on his flesh. He stared at the bed, and felt the pain return.
In the strange half-darkness, he could almost convince himself that the years had melted away, and that it was her lying before him. She had lain in this same room, in that same bed. Her eyes had held the same emptiness, her body succumbing slowly to the same agony. The only difference was that she had wept unceasingly the whole time.
I could do nothing for her, he thought, the sadness returning keenly to him. Nothing but take the painful memories away.
He remembered her face the last time he had seen her. She had smiled up at him, her eyes clear and happy and blissfully innocent. A smile free of pain. He kept the memory of that smile within his heart like a shard of glittering crystal, at once beautiful and piercing, reminding him that the most painful thing he had ever done was also the one thing that had guaranteed her happiness.
He drew close to Tohru's side.
Once again, this...
"I'm sorry, Tohru," he murmured. He smoothed the hair away from her forehead. "But soon... everything will be alright."
He passed his hand gently down over her unseeing eyes, closing them. As he felt it beginning, rushing through his veins and passing from his fingertips onto her soft skin, words echoed in his heart. The same words he had been unable to say to her, years before:
Try to remember... if only the happy times...
Tohru's neck stiffened for a moment, her head arching backwards. And then it was over. He lifted his hands from her face. Her neck relaxed slowly, her head sinking into the softness of the pillow. Her cheek came to rest against the white linen.
When she opened her eyes, the first thing she saw was a tree flying past the window. And on the glass in front of her face, she caught a faint outline of some reflection. Her eyes wandered over the soft leather that seemed to cover everything like a skin. The wide band of a seatbelt chafed against her cheek. She lifted her head and stared out the windshield.
I'm in a car, she realized, her eyes drawn to the asphalt that stretched on ahead. It appeared to be early morning. The sky was a sickly gray, a lingering trace of shadowy clouds marring the light of dawn. The sun was nowhere to be seen. A thin drizzle spattered against the windows.
She heard a click, and the windshield wipers immediately began moving over the glass. She turned her head.
A man sat in the driver's seat. She knew with absolute certainty that she had never seen him before.
She continued to stare. He paid her no heed, his eyes focused on the road. His face was half-hidden by his dark hair, which fell in careless locks against his cheek. He was clad completely in black, his pale skin stark against the line of his turtleneck. Past the heavy sleeves of his wool coat, long, slender fingers gripped the steering wheel.
Suddenly he shifted his gaze from the road and glanced at her for a moment. She froze. His eyes had a peculiar electrifying quality to them -- a glittering hardness that could be keenly felt. Suddenly she felt very cold.
"You're awake," he remarked. His voice sent shudders up her spine. It had a delicacy that nevertheless failed to hide an underlying harshness. It reminded her of silk being dragged over a rough mat.
Slowly, she began inching herself away from him.
"Don't lean on the door," he told her absently, momentarily eyeing a tiny flickering light on the dashboard. "You're making the side airbag light go on."
She jerked away from the door. In the silence, her heartbeat drowned out the sound of the wipers rubbing mechanically against the windshield. She looked down at her hands, and noticed for the first time the white strips of bandages stuck onto her skin. She moved a fingertip over one. A slight soreness sprang from her touch. Suddenly a row of dense trees shot up along the road. Again she caught the faint reflection in the window. She turned her head and stared.
She blinked at it. The features were vague against the rapidly shifting background of green, completely unfamiliar. The eyes, the arch of the brows, the mouth, the tilt of the nose. Long brown hair that touched her cheek in tangled locks. Pale, parched-looking skin.
It was a stranger's face, just as unknown to her as the face of the man beside her.
Is this my face?
Her face. How come she didn't know her own face? Her eyes moved wildly over the reflection on the glass. At that moment, the row of trees ended and a bright, washed-out sky filled her window. The face was lost.
"No." The protest came out as a ragged whisper. Her hand touched the cold glass.
"There's a mirror on your visor."
He had spoken again. She stared at him.
"What?" The same whisper, her anxiety lending a sharper edge to it.
Without another word, he reached out and flipped her visor downward. She crouched away from his arm. He returned his hand to the steering wheel.
She looked up. A small plastic lid was set into the plush padded leather of the visor. With unsteady fingers, she pushed the cover open and found herself staring into a tiny mirror. Slowly, she adjusted the angle of the visor until a face came into view.
It was a sharper image of the reflection she had seen. The eyes, she discovered, were a pale green. The face was young -- a bit haggard-looking, but definitely young. Suddenly she realized something.
"You know."
He kept his eyes on the road. "I know what?"
"You know what's wrong with me!" She faced him fully now, fear momentarily forgotten, replaced by a frantic desire to know. "What is it? What's going on?"
"You've been ill," he answered simply.
Ill. She stared down at the bandages on her hands.
"I feel ill."
He said nothing.
She took a deep breath.
"I'm sorry, but..." she began hesitantly, "I really don't think I know... who you are."
"Really."
His voice was perfectly calm. His hand swept the turn signal lever downwards. The ticking sound filled the silence. The car turned off the road onto another highway. In the distance she could see a cluster of tall buildings, cloaked in hazy smog.
"Who are you?" she asked him. "Where are you taking me?"
"One question at a time." He steered the car smoothly out of the exit onto the highway. The lever snapped back up, and the ticking ceased. "I'm taking you home," he answered.
"Home?" she echoed.
He glanced at her.
"You really don't remember anything?"
His words shocked her completely.
"Wh-what do you mean... " she murmured faintly, her mind racing. Remembering... Was that what was wrong with her? She couldn't remember anything?
"Tell me your name," he said suddenly.
"What?"
"Your name." Again he shifted his eyes to her for a moment. His lashes were uncommonly long, veiling his gaze. She felt as if he were watching her carefully, waiting to see something.
Her name. Incredulously, she realized that nothing came to her. Her mind drew a blank.
"My name," she repeated, commanding her mind to remember. "My name is... "
He waited. The silence stretched on.
"Nothing?" he inquired.
She stared at him, her eyes wide and terrified. With one look he could tell that she was on the verge of breaking.
Hatori had done what had been expected of him.
Akito felt a deep calm settle into his bones. He drove steadily towards the city. He could feel her eyes intent upon his face. With smooth grace, he lifted his hand from the steering wheel and touched her cheek. She stiffened.
He glanced at her.
"Your name is Tohru," he told her softly. "And you're my wife."