The short burst of relief that spread through both Shigure and Kazuma upon seeing Tohru return with Kyo in her arms was quickly replaced by alarm at the sight of blood running down the young girl's shoulder, staining her ripped shirt.
The two men rushed forward, taking the pants and the boy from Tohru's arms. She frowned. "No, I think… I think I should keep him in my arms, just a bit longer…. I don't think he'll like…" Tohru's eyes went a little foggy as she stumbled a bit, and Shigure reached out to catch her.
"Come on, Tohru, take it easy. You're hurt." The young girl looked in surprise at the blood seeping through her shirt on her shoulder, as if only recognizing now that it existed. "Let's get you inside, okay? I'll call Hatori, you might need stitches."
Tohru's eyes widened. "No, don't do that, I wouldn't want to bother him. He's always busy with…. Akito…" her already feeble voice trailed off as she stumbled once more and lost consciousness, exhausted from the events of the past few hours and the blood loss she was experiencing.
With Kazuma carrying Kyo and Shigure holding Tohru, the two hurried inside. "Yuki!" Shigure called, and the urgency in his voice combined with the ominous silence that it broke brought the young man to the top of the stairs in seconds.
The feeling that bubbled inside the young prince was something unlike anything he had ever felt before. Never in his life had he felt as close to someone or as protective of them as he did of Tohru, and seeing her unconscious and bleeding in Shigure's arms sparked an unfamiliar fire of rage in the pit of his stomach. Seeing Kazuma come in directly after with that damn cat in his arms, along with his pants and bracelet, it took only a second for Yuki to piece together the unnatural feeling that had been in the air with the scene before his eyes and realize what had happened.
Seeing the mix of fury, shock, and concern in Yuki's eyes, Shigure shook his head. "Now's not the time. I'll explain later. I need you to call Hatori right now."
Yuki nodded and, trying his best to bring his emotions under control, ran to the phone and dialed the doctor's number.
The voice on the other end of the line was not happy. "Whoever is calling me at this hour of the morning better have a damn good reason."
"You need to come to our house right now, Hatori," Yuki said in a monotone voice – the only way he could keep from screaming through the phone.
The grey-haired boy could feel a new alertness at the end of the phone line, and heard the rustle of sheets being pulled off and the doctor getting dressed. "What happened? Who is it?"
"It's Tohru," Yuki replied, trying not to let his voice sound as strained as he thought it did. 'I don't know what happened yet. All I know is that she's bleeding and unconscious, and I think that damn cat did it, and you need to get here right now-"
The telephone was taken from his grasp, and Yuki turned to see Shigure shooing him away, continuing the conversation in a hushed whisper. The two phrases Yuki could hear before he was motioned out of earshot confirmed the young prince's suspicion: 'true form' and 'injured' was enough for Yuki's desire to rip Kyo's throat out to come roaring back to life, leading him to stride down the hall in search of the bastard who caused all of this.
He heard a slight poof as he passed one of the sliding paper guest bedroom doors, and when he went back to slide it open, he met Kazuma pulling some sheets over a naked, orange-haired young boy.
Seeing the fire in his eyes, the older man stepped out of the room and closed the door, beckoning Yuki outside. With great restraint, Yuki followed.
When they stepped outside, he immediately began his interrogation in a loud, angry whisper. "What the hell happened, Sensei? What the hell did that damn cat do to her?" And, in his mind: And give me one good reason why I shouldn't kill that bastard once and for all.
Kazuma shook his head gravely, but explained. "Long story short, I took off Kyo's beads. He changed. Tohru saw it, and went after him – that was a few hours ago. She just came back now, bleeding, and fainted before she got in the house. She's in one of the downstairs bedrooms."
Realization flashed in Yuki's eyes, and he rushed at his martial arts master, grabbing his shirt and looking him dangerously in the eye despite the height difference. "So, this is your fault. You knew this was going to happen. You knew she'd go after him, you pulled off his damn bracelet on purpose because you wanted to see what would happen."
Kazuma said nothing, only returning Yuki's enraged glare with his own unrevealing one, neither accepting or denying the story as truth (for it was, in fact, a bit of both), and when the young man realized that he wasn't going to get anything else from the older man, he let go of his shirt with a shove. "You're even worse than the damn cat," he accused in a growl full of hate as he turned around and ran back to find Tohru. Yuki would never admit it aloud, but for as much as he hated Kyo, he knew that the cat was a good person at heart, and that, regardless, he'd never do anything to consciously hurt Tohru… at least, that was what he had thought, before he saw Tohru's shoulder staining her shirt with blood.
It was still Kazuma's fault for taking off the beads. Everyone in the inner Sohma family – everyone – knew the consequences of that.
Kyo woke up to hushed whispers, and the familiar feeling of a cold metal stethoscope on his chest. Instinctively he breathed in and out deeply twice before coming to his senses.
"Wait… Hatori? What are you… what happened…?" He trailed off as the previous events of that night came back to him, and his eyes widened. "Where's Tohru? Is she okay?!"
"Kyo, calm down", the young doctor warned him. "She hasn't woken up yet, there's nothing you can do right now to help her. Are you hurting anywhere?"
The orange-haired boy's eyes widened as he realized the implications of that sentence, that not having woken up meant that she was unconscious, and that if there were no visible injuries on himself then the doctor wouldn't have been called, and that, therefore, something was wrong with Tohru.
He hurt her.
As he remembered the murky feeling of his claws ripping through her shirt and past some of her skin, he struggled to get up, thrashing at the hands trying to hold him down. "Let me see her!" He screamed, when he felt a pinprick in his leg, and the also familiar feeling of anesthesia started to wash over him. "see… her…" he gurgled as he lost consciousness, barely making out Shigure somewhere in the background, behind his closed eyelids, telling someone that this had been a bad idea…
She barely registered the gelatinous feeling in her left shoulder as she struggled to open her eyelids, still in a sleepy daze, thinking she was late for making breakfast. As her eyes shot all the way open, she registered hushed whispers silencing, and saw the Sohma family gathered around her.
"Wha… Shigure… Hatoriiiii? Wait, is someone injured?!" And then, remembering the previous night, "Kyo!" She shot straight up in her bed, only to feel a sharp, stabbing pain in her shoulder. She cried out and closed her eyes against the pain, then immediately felt the cool, slender hands of a doctor brushing over her, checking for abnormalities.
"Careful, Tohru! You'll undo your bandaging! Here, take some Tylenol", Hatori said, and Tohru took the two pills shoved into her hand with a glass of water she saw by her bedside, trying to keep her eyes from watering too much. When she was able to concentrate on something other than the pain, she found Shigure and Yuki at her side as well as Hatori, and slowly eased herself up. "Is Kyo okay?"
"Don't worry about him, he's fine right now. How are you, Tohru?" Shigure asked, as Hatori did some basic inspections on Tohru's wounds and eventually laid her back down.
"Fine, I guess. I've had worse", she said in her usual cheerful tone, though the wince in her face said otherwise.
"I doubt it", Hatori muttered. "You've got some pretty deep wounds there, Tohru. I had just finished cleaning them up when you awoke. I'm afraid I'll have to put you back under for now so I can sew you up, okay?"
"O…okay", she said in a small voice, and as the anesthesia Hatori gave her began to take effect, she vaguely registered a hand holding hers – Yuki's she thought – and gave a small squeeze back before going under.
But not completely.
Maybe the dose Hatori gave her wasn't enough, maybe it was that her shoulder was too painful for the normal dosage to work, but she could still feel the young doctor cleaning out her wounds and stitching them up through the depths of her drowsiness, and though she tried to keep silent, a couple of groans escaped her lips during the process. Luckily, though, she wouldn't remember anything about it when she woke up a few hours later.
The next week was hell for everyone in the household.
Hatori took up semi-permanent residence, and was attending to Tohru when he wasn't checking up on Akito back at the Sohma main house. Kyo became reserved, and refused to speak to anyone – even the few times that Tohru had managed to go in there, he had remained in his sitting position, not saying anything, not looking at anyone, until she left. After doing this twice she realized he needed his space, which was secretly a relief to her since it still hurt terribly to move about too much either way.
Eventually, though, after enough time and occasional visits from Tohru and the Sohmas, he began to talk again. After two weeks, both he and Tohru were ready to go back to school, though neither had really talked to each other about what happened – Kazuma had gone back to the dojo with glares from Shigure, Hatori, and Yuki, and neither Uotani or Hana had been allowed to visit under the pretense that Tohru had a highly contagious stomach flu. The final morning of Hatori's semi-residence, and the day before the return to school, the young doctor gave Tohru a final check-up.
Neither said anything much. Most of their check-ups for the past few weeks had been like that – they both enjoyed the simple silence of the other, and Hatori wasn't too talkative, either.
This silence was different, though. It was tense, and awkward, and was broken just as Hatori was packing up his things and Tohru was pulling her shirt back over her head, careful to avoid the bandaging that covered her wounds.
"I know", she said quietly, in a sad little voice, with an out-of-place smile on her face.
"What's that?" Hatori asked.
"They're not going to heal, are they? The scars, I mean."
Hatori looked away, and a pained frown passed across his face. "I'm… I'm sorry, I don't think they will. For a girl to have scars…but it can't be helped."
"It's not the scars that I care about", she said quietly, and the young doctor looked at her in masked confusion. "I mean, I can always say that I had a freak accident or something in the kitchen, clumsy as I am. It's believable. I just…." She trailed off.
Hatori understood. "You just can't let Kyo know that what he did to you won't go away."
She nodded. "If he asks, I'll just tell him there aren't any. Scars, I mean. Bathing suit season is over, anyway", she added, an attempt at a joke that fell miserably flat.
The young doctor sighed. "I'm… sorry, Tohru. Really, I… I am. If you hadn't gotten involved with us…."
"No, that's not it at all!" She suddenly exclaimed, looking up in determination. "I won't claim to be the most important person in the world, but I understand the importance of what Kazuma did. If I hadn't accepted Kyo for what he was – ugly, terrifying as that form of his is – then he could never have moved on. He needed to know that the cat's other form can be accepted, legitimately, and not just ignored or hated. I know how important my sticking by him was to him – and I would double or triple the amount of scars I got from that night if I had to do it again. More than anything, I'm glad that I could be there. I just don't want to give him anything to regret about that night, because as terrible as it was for both of us… it was important to me, too." She looked down again at her shoes, suddenly slightly embarrassed at her miniature sermon, having revealed more than she intended to.
She was surprised at the delicate kiss planted on the top of her head, and by the time she looked up to see Hatori leaving, he gave her a small smile. "You know, Tohru Honda, you just might save this family yet."
And so he left, and Tohru kept her promise. When Kyo asked a week or two later how she was healing, she lied and told him that she had no scars – and so, for better or for worse, he knew nothing, and she just smiled, as it had always been, and always would be.
AN: Of course, until they got married. But we'll leave that for later... Kyo's bound to see her in her bikini again soon ;) Hoped you enjoy, and please review if you did! (or didn't, just try not to hate, please. It's rude.)