Disclaimer: I don't own Fruits Basket, nor am I making any sort of profit from this.
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They knew her emotions, her thoughts, her everything, all in a dream. It started with the dream that she was to be born.
Swirling colors and a whisper in the night. "We'll meet soon," it said. Each tear that ran down their faces was an emotion: elation. joy, excitement, hope, impatience for the god-child to be born. Ren and Akira named her Akito.
Now they saw her dreams. The connection between god and the Jyuunishi was literally visible in sleep. Sometimes there were monsters in the closet, green blobs that seeped under the door and through the cracks in the floor. Shigure, Kureno, Ayame, Hatori, Ritsu, and Akito would all wake up quickly, breathing sharp, and then they would roll over and travel back into the world of dreams.
Sometimes the nights would be pleasant and filled with happy dreams of all of them playing in the garden together. Each one of them would sigh placidly in their sleep.
Akito, as god, could tell when a new member of the Zodiac was to join them. It was always the night after conception, when all of the already-born Jyuunishi saw which of them would be born next, boar, horse, rat, cat, ox, and so forth. Excitement flooded their veins; another was to come soon!
However, when Akito was feverish and delirious, so were her dreams. These dreams all took place in lands of miser, hot , cold, and a rain that fell instead of feverish sweat. Some nights like these, Hatori would wake up and creep to Akito's room to wipe her forehead.
One of the worst nightmares that Akito had was on the night after Akira's death. Far from a monster in a closet, the dream was of people screaming and crying; ear-wrenching sobs that wouldn't stop; eternal grief. Echoes of the screams could be heard in each of the Jyuunishi's heads late into the morning.
And then there was the dream of fear, that she would be left alone, abandoned and forgotten. The dream would end when Akito would wake up screaming It had just seemed too real. Kureno snuck out of his room, and past his parents' to comfort the crying girl he had seen in the beginning. He just wanted to try to make everything right in the world for her, if even for a moment.
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A/N: Written out of complete and total boredom. Typing it up, I'm thinking, "This sounded better when I actually wrote it on paper…" Oh well. XD Hope you liked it.
