Disclaimer: Fruits Basket belongs to Natsuki Takaya
Fairytale
Akito can't remember very many of the stories Akira used to tell her, other than the story of God and the Juunishi banquet. Most of her fairytales are heard sitting on Shigure or Hatori's laps, looking at the pictures or tracing the letters as they go.
Not all of the stories are fairytales, but the ones that are always go a certain way. Shigure reads them in his sarcastic and ironic voice, and sometimes he sticks in their own names when there's a happy ending. Hatori just asks every once in a while why she likes these sad stories, and if she wouldn't like him to find her a happier book instead.
In the fairytales, the beautiful stepmother is evil and cruel, and the loving father is weak and dies. And the little girl is left all alone, except sometimes she has friends, like the animals who help her. And they talk to her and love her, and then maybe one day they'll defeat the stepmother, just like father must have wanted for her.
It doesn't work out very well that way, though. She misses Akira and wishes Ren would have gone away instead.
Sometimes when Yuki is napping and she can't find Shigure, Akito wanders around the porch and watches the other family members. Some of them are Juunishi, and she knows their names and they come to celebrate New Years with her, but others are just regular Soumas.
Some of them are little girls. They all like to play house, with dolls and teacups and other girls or boys. They play the mommy, and the daddy, and the baby, and the dog; they never play the evil stepmother and the little girl and her animals.
Akito wonders, if she was a girl, if she would play house too. She would be the mommy, and Yuki would be the baby, and Shigure would be the daddy. Or maybe Hatori would be the daddy, and Shigure would be the puppy?
But Akito doesn't want to be the mommy, because she doesn't want to be anything like Ren. If she has to be mean when they play pretend, then she may as well be the evil magician locking the princess in a castle. But if they make-believe that game, Akito would rather be the princess anyway, except that she isn't.
She tries to play with just herself and Yuki anyway. It's not quite house, because there is no mommy. Akito is the daddy, and Yuki is the baby. But the game doesn't work very well, because she has a hard time remembering the things Akira did and Yuki doesn't really know much about his father, either. So they play other things besides make-believe.
She and Yuki are always together, the way it's supposed to be, the way father promised her before he died. Sometimes Akito gets upset, and has to be told to mind her temper, and other times she's very good, and she gets accused of mothering Yuki, though that doesn't really make any sense. Ren isn't nice, and Yuki's mother isn't taking care of him, so mothering isn't at all what she's doing.
Like sometimes when Yuki has nightmares in the middle of the night. Experience tells him not to, but instinct has him crawl over to Akito's futon anyway, drying his eyes with one little fist. And experience tells Akito to yell at him and go back to bed, but instinct makes her sigh and move over, wrapping her arms around him just like Akira would.
Letting the little wet face snuggle against her chest isn't mothering. It's what Akira and Shigure and Hatori do. It's what Akito does, because Akito's a boy and not a girl and not at all Ren.
Akito can't wait until all of her Juunishi help her defeat her evil stepmother, just like father promised.
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Owari
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-Windswift