Ok, second fic. My other one isn't finished, and I'm not going to abandon it, but this is something I wanted to work on too. I'll do my best to divide the updates equally (actually, I'll pro'ly just update whichever I feel like). This takes place roughly after the end of book 14.
Chapter 1. Nerva Somnit
She ran.
She ran through the endless labyrinth of dark corridors, desperate to find a way out, hopelessly hunted down like a frightened rabbit. Hardwood floors creaked beneath her tiny feet, her shallow, laboured breaths rushing past a growing lump in her throat. Her terrified brown eyes took in each shoji door on either side for a split second, dismissing all as a means of escape as, truth be told, she had no idea of either where there would lead or even where she was. A way out. The only thing to be relied upon. She had to get out. They were chasing her, and despite the stitch in her side, the lump in her throat, and her tiredness . . . so tired . . . she had to get away from them. Everything depended on that.
She was indeed a pursued rabbit, with no choice but to run from what preyed upon her. No exhaustion, no obstacle must slow her down. The most important thing in the world now was that she keep running down these corridors, whipping around random corners, closely followed by her tresses of long brown hair, the breath of air which rushed to fill the gap she left . . . . and them.
She almost ran past another door, an open one, but stopped herself quickly upon feeling the caress of fresh air upon her face coming through it. She scanned the room on the other side of it, which was fortunately empty, and spied, on the other side of the room, an open patio screen, through which a cold biting wind was entering the desolate room. A chill, late autumn wind promising death for nature, but hope and elation to the young girl whose eyes were now fixed upon the door with relief.
Not even taking the time to see how far behind her pursuers were, she darted in and was across the room in an instant. She lightly jumped off the wooden deck that surrounded the building and ran out into the darkness of the abandoned Sohma estate. The oppressive mood of the complex was enhanced by the night, and the tiny creature ran through the elaborate prison without being noticed. There was no-one to notice her. Now for the task of getting "outside". The walls rose up around her, caging her in, and mocking her in her attempts to escape from them . . . . an escape many of the Sohmas themselves had tried and failed to make.
Running in between two of the traditional houses, she headed towards the outer wall and, dropping to her knees, began fumbling with the brush tangled on it. Her bruised and welted hands were clumsy in their biting pain, and urgency increased their clumsiness. This was the spot, wasn't it? Maybe she had gotten lost in the dark? Ah! No, there it was! Pulling back some of the brush revealed a hole in the wall, big enough for her to crawl through. She was sure they didn't know about the hole. That might give her some extra time. Silently she thanked the little golden-haired girl who had given her this blessing.
She immediately dismissed the option of running down the street. They would track her down too fast. Besides, she needed to get to the house. The only way was through the dark, threatening forest. She entered the dense woodland which surrounded the Sohma property, paying no heed to the dew which drenched her socks in minutes or the twigs and branches which caught themselves in her hair. It was cold, though. Very cold. Each of her little fingers was numbed into an icicle, so that the pain in them was merely a dull throbbing. White clouds issued from her mouth with each rattling exhalation. Her dress, though long-sleeved and quite warm under normal circumstances, couldn't keep the cold out without a coat. But, cold, wet, nothing must prevent her from running. The lump in her throat swelled. Her exhaustion was overwhelming. Fear and adrenaline coursed through her tiny body.
Dodging trees in her path, she wound her way through the forest, forgetting all fear and apprehension she normally would have felt in this forbidding environment in favour of her deeper fear of capture. A depression in the land appeared in front of her. She slid down an embankment and at the bottom, tripped and fell.
Breathing hard, she lay on the soft, welcoming grass, her side, feet and lungs imploring her to stay as she was. I have to get up. I have to get up. I have . . . . to . . . . . get up! But . . . I'm so . . . . tired.
Mud covered her from head to toe, its brown sludge imprisoned between strands of her hair, and caking her cheek. It was so cold. And yet, it was so tempting to simply fall into the darkness that was growing over her vision just as the earth's darkness had swallowed her form. To be covered with this mantle and forget the cold and the fear, and the pain from the many cuts and bruises on her limbs. The mud on her cheek felt soothing against the angry mark marring her skin. Blood seeped comfortably from her arm directly onto the ground, like a gently-flowing river. There she lay, until the sound of a wolf howling in the distance brought her to her senses. She gasped. Can he still find me, then?
The thought of the wolves finding her instead of him never struck her as frightening. She struggled to pick herself up and keep going. She struggled to her hand and knees, forcing herself to get higher, higher, ignoring the painful protests of her side and feet. The gentle river became a waterfall instead as she escaped the ground and rose higher. She reached out her arm to grab the tree next to her for support . . . .
. . . . . . and with a sickening lurch in her stomach, she felt her outstretched arm gripped by an unyielding hand. Dread and fear settled in her stomach as he pulled her to her feet. Her weakness forgotten, she attempted in vain to pull free of him. What a pitiful thing it would have been to watch, how she, tired, tiny, wounded child that she was, flailed in the grasp of her captor, who effortlessly pulled her up and held her still. In all matter of fact, he was the only thing keeping her from collapsing to the ground again, and still the child hopelessly pulled to get free, convulsions that barely registered with him.
He called out. No! He's calling him here! He turned her around so that she was facing away from him, and shackled her forearms with hands that easily encircled them, forcing her to wince when her bruises protested at this treatment with a jolt of pain. Her blood ran cold when she saw the other man, the one her captor was holding her towards like a sacrifice. The second man stepped out of the shadows of the trees and walked towards the two with a heavy, deliberate step. He stopped right in front of her, towering over her. She hesitated, but dared to crane her neck to look up into his eyes. No, one eye. One visible eye. A blue eye of ice. No words were spoken.
Still she tried to get away; this time, ironically, by backing up, further into the arms of her captor. He released her forearms momentarily, only to imprison her firmly by wrapping his arms around her and pulling her against his chest, her arms pinned to her sides. The movement could almost have passed for a tender embrace, were it not such a mutilation of the intent of a real one. The icy-eyed man gave his companion a long, hard look, then he slowly brought up his large hand to cover the girl's eyes. The last thing she saw before he covered them was his own visible eye, staring deeply into hers and begging forgiveness. She watched as the ice melted and began streaming down his cheek, then, all she could see was darkness.
She began to cry also, tears drenching the palm of his smooth hand. They cried both together, both the condemned and the unwilling executioner, until finally he forced himself to do the deed. She saw a light, growing bigger and bigger. She was rushing towards it. No, that wasn't it. But some of her was rushing towards it. She saw them appear in front of her, one by one, only to be consumed by the light and disappear.
The one who called her "Mutti".
The one who called her "sister".
The one who apologised even right there in her mind, before he disappeared.
The one who was really two people she would lose.
The one who had the courage to admit he was a child.
The one who seemed very much like a brother.
The one who smiled sadly and said "Goodbye".
The one who she had tried to break the Curse with.
The one who could see all the good qualities in her loved ones.
The executioner himself.
The one who would not cry.
The two whom she loved so dearly, who had been like brothers. And maybe, he had been something more.
Then it was dark, all around there was nothing around her but a void. The forest was gone, the night was gone. Everything was gone, and there was no-one. No-one except for him. In the darkness, there was nothing else to look at. She was petrified by his appearance in the darkness, a cruel, twisted imitation of a smile hewn across his face, hair black as the night and his own malice-filled heart, face as pale as death, long white fingers tipped with knife-like fingernails, the cut of which she had felt before.
He extended his arm and brought icicles of fingers to her cheek. Wrapping his other hand around the back of her neck like a noose he pulled her forward and whispered into her ear, "You can't save them . . . . . You can't even save yourself from me." Silence reigned over the two for a while, oppressive and constricting as the prison she was trapped in. His.
Again he whispered, hot breath tickling her ear. "This isn't over. I won't let you off as easily as that." With that, he released her, and without warning, shoved her hard so that she fell to the ground. Her already battered body screamed in protest as a fresh wave of pain overtook her. She ignored it however, and scrambled to her feet. He was walking away, beginning to disappear, too. Still shaken by his words and – Don't think about that! she commanded herself – she ran towards him and grabbed at the sleeve of his black coat, which almost made him invisible in this dark void.
"NO! Stop, please! Come back!" Even him. She didn't even want to lose him. The last one. "Come back!" Pain shot through her face as he slapped her hard, and she lost her grip on his sleeve and fell back again. He towered over her, a pinnacle of commanding power. He knelt down beside her and gripped her shoulders. A gentle voice with a dangerous edge issued from his mouth next, like the flat of a deadly sword.
"I will come back. You'll eat those words by the time I am done. But you're never going to see them again. They will remain, bound closer to me than ever before. And it's all. Your. Fault. You've failed them. You deserve to be abandoned by them." She shook her head. "Just as you have been abandoned by everyone else."
With that he disappeared, the feel of his icy fingers vanished from her shoulders, and she was alone in the blackness. "Come back!" she cried out pitifully, tears streaming once more down her face. "Come back!"
"Come back, please! Please don't leave me here!"
With a start, still uttering the words "Come back", Tohru Honda shot up in her bed. Her eyes darted around the plain, modern styled room she shared with her cousin. Nothing was out of the ordinary. She took a few deep breaths, attempting to slow her racing pulse.
"A dream," she murmured. "It was only that dream again, Okaa-san." But it had been so frightening. She had been having this nightmare for a while now, and each time it woke her, each time the same words "Come back," had fallen from her lips, those words the only memory she ever had left of the dream. It was bizarre. In her mind, Tohru knew that the dream was a recurring one, and that it was truly, truly terrifying, but she could never recall any detail of it. "I can't remember, Okaa-san. Why can't I remember?!"
No answers would be found to these questions tonight, so, forgoing her own anxiety for the moment, Tohru checked to see if her cousin, Chinatsu, was awake. She wasn't. Thank goodness I didn't wake her up this time. I made her very angry the last time I did. A small wave of rue came over her at the trouble she had caused Chinatsu, but then, remembering how the older girl had asked her "So what happened? Uh, don't tell me you wet the bed. Man, it's bad enough I have to share a room with you but you also do gross things like that?!" Tohru had received a deal of grief from her cousin about that incident – she even went so far as to tell her aunt and uncle – even though she had tried to explain that the liquid was sweat. Not that Tohru held it against her cousin. After all, regardless of what it was, she had been the cause of making the bed wet and waking her cousin, and there was such great deal of sweat that Tohru could easily see how it could be mistaken for a "spill". How many people sweated so profusely about nightmares anyway? Particularly ones they couldn't remember afterwards.
I'm pathetic.
Ah! The bed is wet again! I'd better change the sheets. I don't want Chinatsu-san getting grossed out by me again! And if Oba-san and Otoji-san find out I've ruined two sets of sheets (Tohru neglected to think about the fact that she hadn't ruined any sheets at all), they'll be very angry at me.
She rose quietly from the bed and very carefully pulled the sheet off, keeping an eye on Chinatsu to make sure her sleep was not disturbed. Folding the white mass to a manageable size, she opened the door to the room quietly and tip-toed to the linen closet. She was very careful not to wake anyone. She didn't want to make her relatives angry again. Not for the first time, Tohru pondered the shift she had felt in the way they spoke to her, looked at her. Lately she really couldn't do anything right. They always seemed to be angry at her.
Tohru knew she was a clumsy, largely useless, and often stupid girl. She knew she caused much more trouble than she was worth. And she knew that ever since she had started living with her aunt, cousins and grandfather, they had constantly had to scold her. She had never, ever been good or diligent enough to earn any praise. Oji-san was always being kind to her, but then, he was the sort of person who found it very hard to be mad at others. He was always being too soft on her.
Lately though, harsh words had become harsher, and they were thrown at her everywhere, where before she would have been largely ignored. More and more chores were being left to her that Chinatsu would have done before. But there must have been something she did to deserve it. Yet everytime she tried to think about the point where the change in behaviour had occurred, everything in her memory seemed blurred and indistinct, like a black and a white circle fading into each other, the point of change no longer apparent.
She was so pathetic she couldn't even realise what it was she had done. As she pulled out a clean sheet and placed the damp one on top of the boiler to dry, she thought for the hundredth time about the possible answers to this problem. She had heard that her older cousin's desire to be a policeman wasn't working out well at all. But what could that have to do with her? Tohru didn't know, but when she inquired about it, he had slapped her across the face. "Slut," he said. Chinatsu and her aunt hadn't said a word. In fact they had given Tohru hard and angry looks, to her bewilderment.
Maybe all it is is that I've been slacking with work. Yeah, that makes sense. After all I've been given more chores, so it makes sense that that's the punishment. Oh, but that doesn't explain what I did to make my cousin lose his chance to be a police officer. Oh, Okaa-san, I should be grateful to be allowed to live here . . . so why do I keep feeling worse and worse the more I think about it? I must be getting very spoiled.
She was about to return to the room when she heard the front door open downstairs, and close heavily. Who is it? It was late at night, and Tohru momentarily entertained the possibility of it being a prowler.She dismissed it however, as the door had been opened very easily by . . . whoever it was that had opened it. Timidly peering down the stairs, she called in a voice low enough not to disturb her sleeping relatives, "Is someone down there?"
That was my first time writing using Tohru's character. I hope I did ok with her. She's hard! Thank you for reading and stay tuned for more! (Ugh, I sound like an advert, lol!) If you have any questions at all, leave them in reviews and I will answer them if I can without spoiling the story . . .
Plus, there are going to be some Latin themes in this story (teeny, tiny ones). And all the chapter titles are Latin.
Thanks, hugs from Suteki31392!!