H-hello…l-l-l-ong t-time no s-see…

*ducks under bed to avoid flaming arrows and garbage flying at head*

G-g-g-gomenasai!!

*pokes head out from under the covers*

I know I didn't keep my promise…I'm so so so sorry!! Really!! I c-couldn't help it!! I just started high school and I barely came out of the first quarter with a 3.8, and I'm taking 2 honors classes and two languages at the same time…I've been to busy…;_;

And right in the middle of me typing my chapter, one of my best-best-best-best-best-best-best-best most awesome, amazing, cool, wonderful, sweet, cute, loyal, extraordinary, marvelous, and all around perfect anime-loving friends (Natalia ;_;) went to live in Brazil and I wont get to see her for over a year!!! I've been too depressed to move…

I'm such a horrible person! I got way more reviews than I expected, from all these wonderful people, and I didn't even update for 4 months!! Waaaaaa, don't hate meeeee!

Sorry about that horribly long intro/autobiography, but I hope it keeps you from lynching me...even though I totally deserve it.

Anyway, Here's is what you've all been waiting for…the next chapter of my furuba fic!

Enjoy!

Dark Demigoddess

Disclaimer: I will own Fruits Basket when Kyou and Yuki hold hands and skip to class.

Chapter 2: Found

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Yuki was sitting at the small table, shoving batteries into the three flashlights that were his small search party's most essential tools. His fingers trembled and constantly dropped the slippery cylinders, scrambling to catch them before they rolled onto the floor and further delayed him from his urgent mission. He could hear Kyou in the kitchen filling up water bottles, firing question after question at Shigure. The dog was rubbing ointment on the gangster girl's hands in an attempt to fight off the speckled rash that was spreading across her skin, her souvenir from a nasty run in with some poison ivy.

"I told you already. Ha-san will call me when he finds her. He won't let her down." The playful whine that usually laced the author's voice was absent, replaced by a restless tone that was more than a little unsettling.

"But it's been almost an hour!" Behind the cat's angry voice was the slightly muted sound of running water. Yuki heard it slosh around sloppily in the sink, more going down the drain than into the bottle.

"Then he should be calling any minute." Shigure responded softly, trying to soothe the frazzled red head as he closed the small first aid kit with a click. "And if…when he does, I'll be here." He slid the shouji open sharply, causing an angry cracking sound, which was followed by the light tapping of his bare feet on the stairs as he went to return the box to the bathroom cupboard.

The steady ring of water hitting the walls of the metal sink was the only sound in the moments that followed. Shigure's behavior, though understandable, disturbed and unnerved them. When the three had departed into the dark woods, the dog had been frantic and worried, nearly in tears. Now, the man who usually comforted the people around him with his mood lightening antics was replaced by an anxious doppleganger that seemed unrecognizable in anything but appearance.

The tinkling water stopped abrubtly, the echoing creaks of Shigure's footsteps filling the sudden silence. Kyou slowly walked into the dining room where Yuki toiled angrily with the flashlights and wordlessly dropped one of the three dripping bottles he was holding in front of the preoccupied mouse. Startled eyes jerked upward towards the cat, who had relaxed against the opposite wall, leveling his blood-red gaze downward.

"Hurry up with those, kusonezumi." He halfheartedly added the insult, trying to add a sense of normalcy to the bizarre situation. The angry tone with which he'd spoken to Shigure had softened, probably out of regret for indirectly causing the author's retreat. "We're waiting on you."

The gray-haired teenager nodded his head, sliding two batteries into the final dark tube with a clunking sound. His unsteady hands screwed the top on tightly as the blond gangster purposefully walked through the door and jerked her bottle out of Kyou's hand.

She was still wearing her flowing school skirt, but she had replaced the outfit's customary blue top with a plain white T-shirt, which seemed to be the unofficial uniform of their small band of searchers. She had rather forcefully required them to change, insisting that they needed to be able to see and recognize each other in the pitch colored darkness.

Yuki had to admit that it was a good idea, although it was most likely a notion that had remained with her from her violent past, when the hunters she traveled with weren't incredibly concerned with the welfare of the object of their search. But now wasn't the time to dwell those things. Everything seemed trivial compared the problem he was facing now. He wouldn't let any irrelevant thoughts pass through his mind until they got Tohru back. His Tohru.

He stood solemnly and relinquished the flashlights to their rightful owners. "Let's go." His light voice rolled out of his mouth as a determined, confident sound, but inside he was terrified of the possibilities that lay outside in the sinister wilderness, waiting to be discovered.

Yuki's deceivingly steady hand reached the door and gently slid it open, like a portal into the engulfing maw of the night. His sneakered foot had barely come to rest on the first stone step outside when he heard a something that sounded almost completely alien to his ears, that filled the utter stillness of the twilight with it's bold, reverberating peal.

The phone was ringing.

He had never heard anything as beautiful as that repetitive chime. Spinning with inhuman speed and grace, he shoved Kyou aside and sprinted straight for the source of the metallic intonation.

Yuki could hear Shigure tumbling ferociously down the stairs as he threw open the door to the hall. The cat was right at his heels, little angry pants echoing from his throat at steady intervals as he tried to catch up with the mouse. He could see the phone now, undisturbed on the wall at the end of the hallway.

Finally the sleet haired youth aggressively closed his hand around the receiver, his balmy palms sticking to the cold, unresponsive plastic. He could hear his own heavy breath pounding into the phone as his quaking hand pulled it to his ear, ferociously melding it with the flesh of his face, silencing the beautiful ring.

Yuki held the phone close to him, so close that he could feel his lips brushing against the small pores of the apathetically cold mouthpiece as he desperately huffed the doctor's name.

"Hatori-san!"

The sharply spoken spurt of sound seemed more like the plea of a dying man than a question of any kind.

As he received the response form the other end, the teenager's heart nearly stopped beating, and the blood in his veins turn to ice. He heard the voice that had lurked in his nightmares as an evil specter ever since he was a small child, flittered through all the fearsome memories he'd had ever experienced; the most destructive voice he'd ever known, now chuckling malevolently at him through the crackly static.

"Wrong, Yuki."

________________________________________________________________________

After he spoke, Akito listened as the rapid pants of breath that had answered the phone ceased abrubtly. The silence from the other end of the line seemed so sudden that he wouldn't have been surprised at all to find out that the speaker had dropped dead from shock.

He laughed quietly to himself. This was the reaction he'd craved, the feeling he'd expected from the doctor when he'd startled him at the entrance of the Honke. The delicate-seeming leader said nothing for a long while, basking in the rush of ultimate power, the effect he still managed to inflict upon his very favorite relative. No matter how weak I feel physically, he mused to himself as the utter stillness progressed, Yuki will never let me down.

Finally, the startled mouse spoke, breaking Akito out of his dreamlike state. "A-Akito-san. F-forgive my frankness, but w-why are you calling us…a-are you with Hatori…?"

Akito felt an ominous laugh crawl up his throat, spilling it's slippery presence across the threshold of his pink lips and slithering to his subordinate's ears. He loved it when he was able to laugh like that, without forcing or creating it consciously. Yuki's trembling was practically audible.

"As a matter of fact, I am." He spoke in a maliciously light one of voice, gleefully cradling the doctor's phone in his slim, frosty fingers. He was surprised his mousy underling hadn't handed the phone over to Shigure as soon as he had heard his voice. But of course, he was worried about that girl. Worried enough that he would willingly subject himself to the torture that was Akito Souma.

"Did you…find her?" The high voice was calmer now, though still brimming with nervousness.

"Yes." He closed his eyes, the lullaby of Yuki's terrified breaths soothing him as he swung his pale legs out the door like ghostly tree branches, scratching the dead, brown earth restlessly and kicking up small dust clouds that danced into the night like tiny phantoms.

"Akito-san…." Apparently the shaken youth felt it was safe to pursue his previous line of questioning. "Is she alright? Please, please tell me."

The leader stayed torturously silent for a long moment, purposefully heightening the suspense. "No, she's not alright."

"What?! What happened to her?!"

He savored Yuki's desperate voice, the plea that echoed once, twice, three times into the suddenly unresponsive phone.

"All I can tell you is…" he heard the line go still with the speaker's dread-filled anticipation. "That the last time I saw Tohru Honda, she was unconscious, though she probably wouldn't have been able to walk, had she been awake."

"Oh no…" The feminine sounding voice was suddenly saturated with grief.

Akito's enjoyment was brought to a rather untimely halt as he saw the dragon tromping through the unforgiving plant growth, grappling with the talon-like twigs and crude shrubbery as he headed towards his car, and his long-term patient. His coat was no longer resting on his broad shoulders, causing his untucked shirt to glow like a beacon in the moonlight.

The head of the Souma clan watched his progress slowly with a sourly displeased look on his wan face. He would rather the doctor didn't lend his comforting presence to the girl's little family. Not yet anyway.

"I'm sorry, Yuki, truly, but I must be going. We will bring her to the Souma clinic tonight, and you may visit her around 10:00 tomorrow morning." He slammed the phone into the receiver that lay between the driver and passenger seats, terminating the call bitterly after his rushed farewell. Trust his unofficial guardian to ruin the little fun he managed to have these days.

He glared icily as the gloomy and exhausted doctor reached his destination and leaned enervatedly against the metal, speaking wearily to Akito as he pressed his forehead to the cold roof of his small vehicle. "Did you call them?"

"Do you think I was talking to myself?" Akito stood, disarranging the engulfing fabric of his fluttering kimono once again. He spoke on as he tightened it halfheartedly. "Or has my condition grown so severe that my mind is suffering, and I can no longer tell reality from fantasy?" he chortled meanly, his eyes twinkling with a sense of resentful superiority. "Ask another stupid question. It would be nice to see the rest of that education our family paid for."

"Forgive me. It's just…" He rolled his head farther away from Akito, towards the trees and the withdrawn little clearing he had just come from, gazing at the night dismally. "Every one was so concerned, so guilty, the day she caught a simple cold. How on earth will they react to something like this…? This is…" trailing off, he sat soundlessly for a long instant, lids closed against the world's malignant actuality.

"What exactly happened to her?" he tried to sound nonchalant, but Hatori's sorrowful behavior had genuinely piqued his curiosity.

The dragon straightened when he heard the unsuccessfully masked echo of interest in the silky voice, and he stared down at the ailing boy in surprise. He couldn't decipher what Akito's reason for inquiring about Tohru was, but that questioning tone wasn't what he had expected to hear right away.

The startled look wasn't lost on the hostile teen. "Not that I care." He turned, displaying his darkly clothed back to the doctor and deliberately keeping his face averted as he spoke. "I was just wondering what could have shaken you so badly." He risked a glance over his shoulder, growing perturbed when he saw that Hatori hadn't stopped staring at him. "Well?"

The taller man shook his head with helpless exhaustion, dragging the car door open and collapsing in the back seat. He let his head drop back onto the upholstery, speaking to the listener above him whose face had disappeared from view. "She's got a broken leg, and maybe her arm too…I can't tell without doing an x-ray. And she says it hurts when she breathes."

"She's conscious?!" Akito ducked his head under the low metal roof, barely avoiding a painful collision with the hard rim.

"Only for a moment." He opened his eyes slowly, gazing at the ceiling. "She woke up when I got to her, and I calmed her down and explained how we'd found her. I told her that you'd call the house and tell everyone that she was okay…that was her main concern, after all this…that they were still worried about her." He shot a quick glance at the youth beside him, probably guessing that the Souma leader had been less than reassuring to the people he'd spoken with. Before an angry retort could respond to the look, the dragon turned his gaze upward once more, and continued his report on the girl's condition.

"I couldn't do much for the bruises she had…and she had a few minor cuts and scratches, but I don't think she'll need any stitches. I made her as comfortable as I could, and put a makeshift brace on her leg. She passed out after that." He blinked slowly, clearing his head, and leaned forward, pulling the phone towards his face and dialing a memorized number quickly. "I'm going to tell the clinic to expect us."

"Are you sure she doesn't need an ambulance?" Akito's eyes flicked through the gray interior of the car. It was spacious, when the occupants were sitting in their seats, but how would they fit the girl in here for the ride? She would most likely need to lay down, and there wasn't enough room for her to do that comfortably, unless…

"An ambulance would take too long to find her in the middle of these woods, and they would take her to the hospital, not the clinic." Hatori eyed the adolescent apprehensively, cradling the phone gently to his cheek as it rang. "We can fit her in if you'll let her put her head in your lap."

What? How dare he even suggest…?! Fire rose in Akito's eyes as they grew insulted, repulsed. That idiotic Tohru Honda, resting on him like he was some kind babysitter?! He felt his blood boil, a torrent of harsh, angry words crashing to the tip of his tongue, ready to launch themselves at Hatori like painful missiles.

The doctor, sensing the impending storm, brushed his hair away from his face exasperatedly. The aggravated motion revealed his left eye; the one the leader had marred. There was barely a scar, just a few discreet, white, chicken scratches on the doctor's cheek, but the sight of them caused the glowing embers in Akito's mouth to fizzle out momentarily.

It was just a small pang of guilt, but it was an unusual enough feeling for Akito that he pursed his lips, closing the floodgates and forcing the enraged waves back into his soul. He could yell at the doctor later.

"We'll see." Hatori's eyes jerkily darted upwards in surprise, trying to read the dark eyes above him for any ulterior motives that might be lurking in their depths. The teen blew off the look with a scornful snort as he withdrew from the car in a languid, feline motion. He spun slowly, staring off into space as the doctors low voice suddenly permeated the silence, filling it with incomprehensible medical jargon as he spoke with the person on the other end of the line.

After a few moments, Akito restlessly set off through the clingy brush, following the make-shift path that the doctor had forged earlier. The path that led to Tohru Honda. He wanted to witness the extent of her injuries for himself.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*continues trembling under bed*

You hate me even more now, huh?

You're all thinking, "I waited 4 months for this?!! A crap chapter?! How dare that idiotic demigoddess! Maybe it's time to test her immortality…"

Right?

I'm sorry.

I know this is horribly anti-climatic, and it didn't even answer the $100, 000 question: What happened to Tohru?

Don't worry, this was just to tide you over until I could churn the next one out.

Cybeleflame, my beta reader (Arigatou!!), insisted that I post it right now, and not add any more because it would take to long for my nit-picky self to write it all. So, you have this thanks to her!

*crawls out from underneath the bed and gets into Ayame-like position*

I have an announcement to make:

I have recently started reading the manga Gravitation and I'm hooked!! I want more!! If one of you readers can tell me how to get the anime, I would be so very grateful. In fact, if someone tells me how & where to get it, I promise to have updated by the middle of December! Maybe sooner!

So, there's some incentive to help me out!

Please review…I know I deserve flames, but please…be gentle. ;_;

See ya soon!!

Dark Demigoddess