A/N: Written for the Bite-Sized Quotes Challenge on the Fruits Basket Fanfiction Challenges Forum (link's on my profile to anyone interested in Furaba Challenges :D), with the quote below. And because it feels like it's been too long since I've written something Furaba related…which, knowing me, it probably has.
"There was a time when I stopped talking. Just like you. My reasons were a little bit different, but I think the feelings of being ashamed of myself and hating myself are the same." – Yuki Sohma
A Rat in a Shadow
1. There was a time
His place in the world had already been defined. That place was by his God – below him, above the rest of mankind. A place that was rivalled nowhere; that existed in no other plane. That had been constantly renewed through time, whenever a God and a Rat were born to the same period of time.
There was a time he had tried to imagine another world – and a far smaller moment in which he had tried to voice it. But he had learnt since that such a place did not exist, that that place that had been pre-defined for him was absolute. That he was below his God, above all others, and there was no-one, no-one that could be like him. No-one, who wanted to be like him.
For they had a family and another world, a world far bigger than his six-foot deep box that shut him in. They had space, freedom, to do what they wished – move beyond the chains that bound them to their God, because their chains rattled and shook and stretched out beyond sight while his remained short and taut and unmoving.
He…he could only be what had been decided for him. Locked in a cage. Crushed by the overbearing shadow of his God.