Disclaimer: Fruits Basket belongs to Natsuki Takaya
Written for the 10 shakespeare community challenge on LiveJournal
"Which of you shall we say doth love us most?" –Lear, King Lear
Swallowtail
"Alright, I'm—"
She interrupted the rest of his words with her mouth, pressing it firmly against his and ignoring the way he didn't go pleasantly open-mouthed with surprise. Akito lacked the momentum to shake him, but the movement knocked askew the paper fan tucked into Shigure's obi and it clattered to the floor. Quite a forceful greeting, considering he had hardly yet crossed the threshold into the room with his own hello.
The placid hum of cicadas followed him inside, riding on a swell of humid summer air. Just outside the doorframe the wind chime rang softly in the breeze, and the fresh air fluttered the ends of Shigure's hair as it funneled through the opening in the opposite door and down the hall. The improved ventilation made standing in the room more bearable than walking across the shaded porches, but only minimally.
She initially overcompensated in tilting her head, so instead of bashing their noses together, Akito's lips missed all but the corner of his mouth entirely. She hastily realigned them with successive kisses, each as forceful as the first. If her lips held any softness, Shigure could not enjoy it for the pressure and felt only the hardness behind it. A needy kiss, as her hands dragged heavily down on his shoulders with the promise of insistent nails, pulling him to a more convenient height. Even as tall as she had grown, she was forced to balance on her tiptoes when Shigure did not incline his head to meet hers.
Akito hooked her thumbs inside the collar of his kimono and yanked tightly at the fabric, wrenching it around his shoulders. He recognized it belatedly as an attempt to remove his clothing without bothering to untie his belt, a scene reminiscent of a smutty romance novel. Shigure suspected she had picked it up from one of his own—the sort of story that never accounted for the sweat of passion or summer, or the certain way it caused clothes to cling to strange places and removing them to be uncomfortable.
Her breath puffed hotly and irregularly against his cheek, stirring the pinpoints of sweat. Frustrated, Akito gave up the struggle to make his sleeve slide smoothly off his sticky left arm, and she concentrated on sucking on his lower lip instead. The snorts of air across his face grew more infrequent and laborious; the art of breathing through her nose while kissing, Shigure noted, still eluded her. Gradually run too thin on air she pulled away, panting slightly, and dropped down from the balls of her feet.
He ignored her expectant look, neutrally covering her hands with his own and untangling her fingers from the fabric at his shoulders. After a moment's thought he bent down to pick up the abandoned fan, surveying Akito as he slowly straightened.
Shigure sighed patronizingly and tapped the fan against his lips. The colored paper almost covered his knowing smirk. "Now, now, I wouldn't have encouraged you to read my… romance novels, if I'd known you wouldn't learn anything from them—not even the ridiculous parts." Ignoring her scowl, he continued lightly, "I don't write them just for myself, you know. Some of them can be quite educational if you study them properly."
He bopped the top of her head playfully. "Here, fan your face. It's quite flushed."
The scowl deepened, pulling her entire face back years into another pink-cheeked, angry-eyed childhood temper tantrum. Impatiently, Akito swiped her kimono sleeve across her face and brushed her bangs from sticking to her forehead. With a shrug, Shigure fanned absently at his neck as he gazed around the room.
"You're supposed to be happy to see me." Her hands clenched into fists, shoulders hitching in suppressed anger.
"Am I really?" he replied blandly. "After all, you were the one who called me here. And I did notice you were very enthusiastic to see me."
Akito stomped her foot. All of the sexual tension vanished entirely, transforming into a more dangerous kind. "You're never nice enough to me! Why do you come here just to be cruel?"
As if he had a choice to refuse to come, Shigure thought wryly. Once again she was the one wanting, and yet Shigure was forced to come to her like a dog being summoned by a capricious little girl. When had he ever risen above the pettiness of returning her own cruelties with his hurts?
Without looking, he hooked his toes around the wooden frame of the door and pulled it partway closed. Not enough to stifle them, but enough to at least give them a semblance of privacy. Akito might not have cared about dignity—God had free reign to do as she pleased, didn't she, and no one had the right to question—but Shigure was well-versed in the usefulness of maintaining appearances.
A breeze gusted in protest, sweeping around the corner of the door and pressing Shigure's kimono too warmly against to his legs even as it cooled his bare feet. From the corner of his eye he watched the fluttering of the paper tag tied to the wind chime, its ringing light and cheerful in contrast to the atmosphere inside the room. He had hoped to keep the mood more peaceful today, the ever-present scheming and mind games swept into the corners and unacknowledged.
Shigure sighed and shook his head. "Akito, you know I don't come here simply to be mean to you." She opened her mouth, but he cut her protest off quickly with the flick of a finger. "We both know I'm not the nicest person in the world, but I come here because you are the most important to me. Still, how can I help it if you're never specific enough about what you want? 'Come here to see me,' you said. I came. You never said, 'Kiss me.'"
"Kiss me," Akito demanded, her dark eyes challenging—prove it to me. It came across petulantly, gratingly, too like a small child whining for a toy. Unlike the romance novel scenario Akito seemed determined to play out, the heat increased only Shigure's irritability, not his libido. It strained the tentative façade of good-nature he was trying to maintain.
Shigure had long ago realized that the two were perfect for each other in the worst of ways—they resembled each other in all the wrong traits, an exact likeness. Too strong-willed, too motivated with ideal visions, too stubborn and uncompromising; and so they clashed, badly. Akito only sulked, but Hatori echoed her sentiments as cautions: be kinder, be nicer, don't fight a battle of wills with a child like that, don't drive her to tears just to prove your point. If you want to keep her, show a little compassion—you won't need to go so far as to spoil her.
But in order to get what he desired, Shigure needed to win without ever giving ground. If he left behind a single kind inch, Akito would seize it like a leech and promptly demand another. Better to stomp on her now, he had decided in the beginning, and write the story his way so he could assure the proper ending for everyone.
Sometimes, though, his patience ran low.
Anyone could tempt a butterfly with sugar-water—and the pathetic ease of that plot encompassed its entire downfall. It would never prevent Akito from flitting out of his arms into the kind embrace of someone not him. Shigure had never included sharing in his agenda. He did not want her until he had her completely, so he didn't go out of his way to lure her in with niceties.
Still, when she pranced from flower to flower, Akito returned without fail always to him. The temptation, the teasing, only wore him down and made it worse. Some days he loved her so much that Shigure wanted nothing more than to take the coy butterfly and crush her in his hand.
The sulking set of her jaw as she waited pushed Akito's lower lip out into a fetching pout. Smiling darkly, Shigure raised her chin with the fan and kissed her as demanded.
Akito closed her eyes, the tips of her fingers pressing lightly to his bare chest. Shigure had forgone an under-kimono and snugly modest collar—after all, he had no one to impress this afternoon, so he had abandoned his usual attire for a freshly-rolled-out-of-bed look. Whether or not it worked out in his favor that Akito had taken advantage of it rather than taken offense still remained to be seen.
"I love you, you know." She traced delicate patterns over his skin, confident in her power to make him squirm.
Shigure didn't perform. "You love all of us," he dismissed. His lips brushed over hers with each word. "You're kinder to us than we deserve."
Akito ignored the tone of irony and rote memorization, another kind gesture on the part of God. She ran the back of her nails down his stomach in playful warning and tried to sweep aside the confines of the fabric, but the obi held it secure. Her hands paused as she contemplated her next physical tact.
"Yes, but I love you especially, Shigure. Enough to allow things like this." She slid her foot forward across the tatami, shifting fabric a little less than elegantly out of the way until her calf brushed against his. She had shaved her legs for him—how sweet and how dangerous a gesture from a young man no one dared to question. Sexuality—the weapon forbidden to her by her mother, and so precisely the one Akito had taken to using as her right by God. In any other woman seduction was a crime, a declaration of war.
Shigure hadn't taken a moral stance to sex, saving himself for his love. He had slept with many others, with few stipulations—but always in the name of pleasure and fun, never in Akito's vision of battle and weapons. He wanted to avoid being caught up in something so low and gritty if he could, if for no other reason than that he would regret it for not enjoying the act and stripping it of pleasure. So he had studiously attempted to dissuade Akito's advances and curb any encouragement.
Even if her teasing was only unintentional because she hadn't grasped that point, Akito's butterfly antics wrenched him cruelly.
She pressed close, pushing herself against him. Shigure fumbled the fan, and it slipped from his fingers to drop to the floor again. Akito smiled, the smug self-satisfaction clear on her face.
"And since I'm the most important to you, that means you love me too, just as much." Shigure recognized the scheming glint in her eyes and the haughty tilt of her chin. Her hands crept the length of his obi, meeting at the back. "Show me. Prove to me you'll never forget about me or leave me."
Outside, in the stillness, the cicadas' whining rose to a frenzied crescendo, before falling again into a lull. A drop of sweat trickled a slight distance down Shigure's back, his only movement; unconcerned, Akito's fingers worked blindly and confidently at the knot.
"Of course I know Shigure loves me the most, and that you'll make love with me because you love me the most. But I want to see you actually go through with it, for once."
Shigure took half a step back to regain a little space, and the paper of the fan crunched quietly under his foot. "Right here, right now?" He joked dismissively, "Your eagerness is laudable, but I didn't bring anything with me."
"I don't care," Akito replied blithely. The belt loosened, then uncurled to the floor, one end left dangling from her hand. "All I care about is that when you have sex with me, it will prove that you are the one who loves me most."
Shigure's hand caught hers before she managed to slide his kimono off. "Have you grown bored with everyone else, then, or have they simply refused to sleep with you?" His grip tightened, and her eyes widened in surprise at his anger before her own fury was aroused.
"Shigure—!"
He refused to be manipulated, to lose and sacrifice all his hard work, and to lose sight of his ideal dream. And if Akito was determined to self-destruct and pull him down with her, to act like a child while testing a woman's power on him—he snapped and closed his fingers around the struggling insect's fragile wings.
"Even if you were born to be loved," he set his face in cold, unyielding stone, as if denying the possibility entirely, "does playing God give you the right to decide who can and can't love you, and in what ways?"
The obi slithered limply to the floor as Akito fought to free her other hand. "Shut up! You can't talk to me like that!"
"You surround yourself with people you've decided must love you. Do you think Kureno's pity means anything just because he doesn't leave when you tell him to stay? If Hatori only says nice things, is that proof that you control his heart? You move Yuki from one prison cell to another, and simply because he doesn't manage to escape you take that as a sign of devotion?" He dropped her hand as he accused relentlessly, his face disgusted—her own delusions, the family that supported it, and everything that got in the way of what he wanted to achieve. The personal hurt in Akito's eyes buried itself quickly under the layers of shock and righteous anger.
Shigure defiantly held his kimono closed as he bent down to retrieve his belt. Retying it, he calmly controlled his voice, "But you know nothing. I may say you are my most important, but, Akito—I hate you the most."
People often thought the Souma family was largely incapable of love, but the term love was a misnomer. When people used it, did they mean the emotions brought on by the rush of adrenaline and endorphins brought on by traits in particular people? Or, Shigure wondered, did they mean it to describe the complexity of human interaction, the actions taken to empower oneself, to indebt others to a person, to strengthen the perceived ties and bonds of humanity? Love was an empty word. Shigure had only one important motivator—desire.
He desired Akito, and this was the best means to that end.
He smoothed the crinkling left on the fan by his foot, ignoring the upset tears gathered in Akito's eyes and the furious working of her mouth. "Call me again if you want another kiss. But I won't be dragged into playing the game to compete for the honor of your love-slave."
"You can't help but love me!" Akito protested loudly, the redness spreading from her cheeks to her nose and the rest of her face. "That's all you're good for! You're worthless if you don't have me to love you!"
Shigure indifferently turned his back on her tirade and slid the porch door open again.
"Why are you never nice enough to me?!" she screamed after him, stomping in rage and pain. He didn't bother to shut the door, letting her yells follow him with the wind chime and cicadas. Summertime in the Souma estate.
From listening to the footsteps running away, Shigure illustrated a picture of the butterfly traitorously throwing herself, sobbing, into the arms of a sympathetic, Kureno-shaped flower.
…
Owari
…
-Windswift