Disclaimer: I don't own Fruits Basket or any of the characters. I apologize for any inaccuracy of information. This story is purely fictional.
This story takes place before Hatori erases the memories of Yuki's friends.
Yuki and the Mice
The young boy Yuki who was the rat of the zodiac was considered to be the god's favorite zodiac member, but Yuki knew that any mice that got into the kitchen were chased out… or poisoned. Yuki, from his little room in the main house, tried to warn away any mice that thought about going there, but occasionally there were new mice, field mice, fresh from the outdoors, that found their way into the kitchen. Their deaths bothered him.
Akito had been amused to find out from the cooks that since Yuki had been invited to the main house, there were nearly no more mice eating the poison from the traps in the kitchen. Still, Akito continued having the poison traps left out. Akito had been able to figure out pretty quickly that Yuki had been the reason, which meant that the mice dying bothered him. And Akito knew that the poison was the only thing holding Yuki back from letting the mice run loose in the kitchen at night.
Yuki sometimes wondered what would happen if he transformed into a rat and escaped to the kitchen. Would he be able to resist the smell of the poison? Would anyone care? He was only valuable to them in his human form. He knew from the poison how they really felt about mice. He thought he knew.
The mice were a comfort to him in his small, lonely room. He used to play with them, letting them run up and down his arms and around his shoulders. It hurt him to see them, to think about how small and detestable and …crushable they were. But he didn't detest them, and they didn't detest him, so he could live with it. It was just one more thing he thought about that brought him sadness. And the mice knew what sadness was.
Usually only one or two mice came at a time. They played with him and kept him company and told him little things about the world outside his four walls. When he heard someone coming, he whispered to them to run, and they ran through a crack in the floor in the corner of the wall.
He wondered how weak he would have to become to become a mouse and escape through the crack. Usually he only became weak enough when he had an attack, and his bronchioles, the rods in his chest, tightened up inside him and tried to kill him. His chest would seize up and burn like there were molten rods of iron in his chest, and he would sweat, and he couldn't breath. That happened sometimes.
It usually happened either when the pollen count was too high or when the maids cleaned with a cleaning fluid he wasn't used to or when he thought too much. He would think about mice in the kitchen or about the children who ran around playing outside or when Akito told him about how black and dark the world was, and then he wouldn't be able to breath. Akito was always quick to let him know that he was a waste of space, and there were so many, so many other people, especially the other, lower members of the zodiac, who hated him so much that they would want nothing better than to crush him. The bronchioles in Yuki's chest felt the same way.
When that happened, Hatori would be called, and he would give Yuki medicine and tell Yuki to try to calm down and to try not to transform because it would be bad for his bronchioles. He had heard Hatori once telling Akito while Yuki pretended to be asleep, that if he transformed while he was having one of his attacks, it could kill him.
Yuki didn't really know how true that was. No one wanted him to transform, so it made sense that Hatori would give the strongest reason he could think of to keep him from tranforming. His transformation was too detestable. Detestable was a word he had learned from Akito.
Still, it had felt nice the few times when Hatori had wiped the sweat off Yuki's face gently with a cool, wet cloth. It felt different from when Akito did it. There was never a sneer on Hatori's face when he looked at him. Even when it was a matter that had to do with Akito, Hatori always seemed like he was looking out for Yuki's best interests and really wanted him to get better, not just because the Sohma house was paying him double or because Yuki's sickness was a shameless burden on everyone. He was starting to feel like maybe Hatori was a person who Yuki might be able to trust. Not a friend, but not someone who was an enemy.
Then, once, Akito had caught him with two mice in his room. Yuki had been sitting in his corner as usual. It would have turned out better if he hadn't been smiling when Akito walked in. One of the mice ran away without being told and was running into the hole just as Akito saw it. Akito's eyes narrowed. "You've been keeping secrets from me, Yuki, haven't you?" Yuki just stared with wide open eyes.
The other mouse who hadn't been able to get away had gotten a foot caught in loose threads from a hole in the tag in his collar and was trying to squirm out of it. He clicked twice with his tongue against his teeth. That signal meant 'Don't move' or 'Don't come.' The signal had an implication of warning and danger, usually used when mice were out surveying an area for food in unknown territory and one who went out to scout a little ahead had to warn the rest. Sometimes the signal meant Predator.
The mouse in his collar was a good little field mouse. She hadn't joined the mice at the main house for very long, but she already had a likely mate to pair with. A boyfriend. She was friendly and outgoing and generally happy when she came to visit. She had stopped moving when he asked her to. He could feel her heart beating rapidly against the skin of his neck.
"Yuki, tell it to come back." Akito's eyes were still narrowed. That was a dangerous sign.
Yuki did what Akito asked. He turned around as little as he could, keeping his collar back as much as possible to still be able to face the hole, and said, "Come back." He added the two clips at the end so that the mouse would know not to come.
"Yuki, what is that under your collar?" He should have known he wouldn't be able to get away with it so easily. He had hoped the rim of his collar would be high enough. Akito now looked disgusted. "Yuki, give it here."
He didn't have a choice at this point. He reached back and, as gently as he could, eased her back foot and claws out of the threads from the rip in the tag of his collar. Akito didn't like to be left waiting, but he had to be really careful about it. To the mouse he was an impossibly large, strong human, and he didn't want to harm her or rip a toe nail off by mistake, just because he was so big and clumsy.
She was a tiny, unmoving ball curled up in his small hand. Mice curled themselves up that way to have as small a surface area as possible so that a predator wouldn't see them and would move on to larger prey.
Akito moved rapidly and there was a thunk at the other side of the room. Akito turned on him with wide angry eyes.
It was too much. The tag in his collar was still itching against his neck, and he curled himself up into a ball, with his knees hugged tightly against his chest. He was rocking back and forth, crying and shaking. Click, click. Click, click. He kept making the sound with his tongue against his teeth. "You see what happens, dear Yuki, when you keep secrets." Akito was waiting, staring at him, watching his reaction.
That didn't make sense.
Couldn't Akito hear it?
Couldn't Akito hear her screaming?
A maid was called in to clean up the mess. The screaming had by then become quieter, and then it had stopped altogether.
Hatori had been called in, too. Yuki's bronchioles, buried deep in his lungs, had started attacking him again, but he didn't really remember that part.
There had been a lot of blood. Yuki remembered what other mice had looked like after coming back to visit from eating the poison in the kitchen. At first they would be fine, but then they would start to twitch. Then they stopped answering his questions, which were frantic by that point, and they would fall and convulse as the twitching became more violent. There was usually one short howl, a sort of strangled scream, before the blood began to ooze. First it came from the nose, then the mouth, ears, eyes and the end on the other side. If it was a recent mother, the milk from the stomach came red.
The she-mouse, the field mouse, had been bloody like that, nearly pooled in a small puddle of blood, but also a piece of the spine was sticking out of the fur. There was blood still oozing strongly from the back of the head, and the upper half of her body continued to twitch barely even as the maid swept her up into a dust pan with a nose turned up with disgust and carried her away. Hatori must have come at some point after that.
After that, Akito hadn't taken any chances with losing any of Yuki's affection. (It didn't matter how much of Yuki's affection was left, as long as Akito was getting everything he had.) After that day, the hole in the corner of his room had been caulked up. Mouse poison was left in the corner of the room where he normally sat. He chose to sit on the other side of the room at the opposite corner where the floor had a lighter patch, caused by the heavy dosing of bleach scrubbed into the wood to clean the area so that Yuki wouldn't get sick.
Yuki knew that if he got sick like Hatori said and he wasn't able to control his transformation when his bronchioles attacked, it didn't matter how much everyone boasted about him or complemented him or talked about how special he was compared to everyone else. If he got sick enough and couldn't control himself, then there would be another light spot on the floor, just for him. No matter what anyone said, everyone hated rats. Rats were diseased and needed to be removed.
He could still hear the mice occasionally through the walls, but he told them not to come. He begged them not to come. Caulking was difficult to get around, but not impossible for mice.
Occasionally he could catch a whiff of the smell of the poison, which smelled a little like peanut butter. He knew peanut butter was a deadly, irresistible smell for mice. The poison was in a box shaped trap with a small opening that curved around so that Yuki wouldn't be able to get his fingers into it if he tried. He did try. It was a child-safe trap with a lock at the bottom. The poison wasn't really that poisonous for humans. It was also a common medication in humans for preventing blood clots. That was what Hatori said, anyway. Yuki didn't want to imagine humans bleeding out from their eyes, noses, ears and everywhere else.
Sometimes when Yuki was alone by himself, he wondered how weak he would have to become to transform into his mouse form, and he wondered, if he could smell the smell wafting over from the other side of the room, if he would be able to resist.
A/N: Please don't assume that anything I say about medical conditions, mouse behavior, Warfarin, rat poison or bleach has any real scientific research behind it on my part. I've never had bronchitis or seen a poisoned mouse or used bleach to clean a wood surface. The history of Warfarin is pretty interesting, though. Also, I'm aware that most prey animals in the wild don't scream out in pain when they are wounded because it would attract predators. The reason Akito can't hear it is because the scream is in mouse speak, which only mice and Yuki can hear.