A/N: Written for the Furaba Bingo: the Non-Flash Version hosted on the Fruits Basket Fanfiction Challenges Forum (link's in my profile), #152 – rustle.


With the Bed Sheets

Akito's tossing and turning was accompanied by the rustling of her fresh bed sheets. A maid had replaced them less than an hour before, and they were still stiff and smelling of lemon-scented soup. Her constant shifting had nothing to do with the uncomfortable crispness of the sheets, but with the fever that had plagued her since the previous night.

And it still had a frightening grip on her reality. Kureno stood just inside the doorway and watched her: watched her weak and vulnerable instead of the iron-fist she was when residing as the Sohma's head – and the Master of the Zodiac. Kureno watched her stripped bare – from her clothes to the shield by which she covered herself. The shield that turned a little orphaned and abandoned girl into a grown man who was the orphaned, the abandoner – the one who had the fates of so many others in his hand. Even him – even though by all rights Kureno was no longer a member of the Zodiac: the Rooster under which he had been born.

He wasn't that cursed bird any more, but this is why he wasn't free to go.

No-one else saw it. Except maybe the maids, but they simply whined where they thought they could not be heard. And, in part, they could not be: Akito had not thrown them out in a fit of rage, so they'd escaped her ear at least. But Kureno heard them. And Kureno kept his silence because it just meant he was alone in this: alone in witnessing the vulnerability, the truth, that was the Master of the Zodiac and the head of the Sohma family.

That was a girl with fits of sickness that made her drown in her blankets and under the weight of her sweat. And that only Kureno got to see – even though Akito tossed and turned and mumbled and called…and, most of the time, she didn't call for him.

Still, he was the only one who came. The only one who could. Everyone else was too closely bound. They struggled away. Or she pushed them away. Like Shigure. Though she cried for him in days and nights when she drowned in sickness, when she searched for health. More than she cried for him.

She cried for him only because he was the only one there. The one who saw the her without her shields, her masks and her heavy, concealing clothes. Though Shigure had seen all that as well. Before their quarrel.

In a way, it was that quarrel that bound Kureno fast. He could leave; he knew he could leave. He didn't need to be bound by the ghost of his past: the rooster that was no longer him. If someone else grew free they would run and escape. If it was Yuki, or Kyo, or even Rin…

Even Hatori and Aya who were older, closer…

Maybe even Shigure…

And that was that knowledge that made Akito weep and cry and toss and turn with a fever, calling, stretching out her hands to those that weren't there. It was that knowledge that made Kureno stand there and sink. And just listen to the rustling of bed sheets that only he could here, and the heaviness of Akito's breaths in the silence before she was roused enough to sense the loneliness around her and the next cry came.

And, if she called enough, for him to crawl under the bed sheets and embrace her tight.