Aishuu Offers:
Secrets of the Sohma
Mbsilvana@yahoo.com
Disclaimers: Fruits Baskets is most assuredly not mine. It belongs to Takaya Natsuki.
Dedication: For members of the Quicksilver ML, since they take the time to let me know. And this was what they wanted, so....
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Part Seven: Blackness
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My head was spinning as I walked home. It wasn't surprising, really, when I found out that my family's secret wasn't quite what one would consider normal. I had expected Momiji to be illegitimate or something like that - that I could have handled. But knowing that he and other members were cursed to turn into some kind of animal when hugged and that Mama had been made to forget him through some kind of weird hypnosis...
Well, I couldn't be blamed for not guessing the truth, could I?
I felt my slow-boiling temper about to blow. I had just about had it with being lied to, kept in the dark, manipulated, protected and fed shades of truth. I wanted nothing but the unvarnished, whole truth. Papa was about to be the victim of one of my rare explosions. The family may fear Black Haru, but I was about to demonstrate that Black Momo was ten times worse.
When you're little, nothing and no one seems stronger than your father. I was now going to confront that, and remake my world. Inside of me, I felt a nervous, sick feeling, wondering if I was doing the right thing. I was about to take the foundation of my world and rip it apart, all because of a brother I really didn't know.
Did I really want to do this? I wondered as my house came into sight. The option Kyou had offered, and Yuki had seconded, to allow my memory to be erased, which I had immediately rejected, was becoming tempting. It would be so easy to just forget, and go back to my normal life. To forget about these impossible things, and forget about...
Then I thought of my mother's eyes, and Momiji's pain. It was not anything I wanted for myself, imaging what I would look like with that same emptiness. We are the sum of our memories, I thought, and if I let Hatori erase the confusion and pain, I would no longer be Momo. I would be someone else... someone with a terrifying blankness and who the family hated because I wasn't strong enough to deal with the truth.
I came to the front door, and bit down on my lip. Haru had faith that I was strong enough; Yuki seemed to trust me. I would do this, I vowed. Within me, there was rage simmering, rage at thirteen years of lies, rage on behalf of a gentle man who had tried to keep people happy at the cost of himself, rage at the world and its unfairness. I was angry, and Papa was the one who would have to deal with it.
The night was thick and heavy around me, weighing me down with an almost unbearable pressure as I turned the handle with my shaking hand. It took a second to gain the courage to call out.
"Tadaima!"
No "Okaeri!" answered me, and the tension in my stomach rose. I knew I had been out late, too late, without letting them know where I was. They were probably ready to ground me, and that meant we would all be starting off the evening with bad moods.
Good. Fair footing.
"Papa?" I called.
"In the kitchen," he replied, and there was a stiffness to his voice that warned me I was about to miss a month's free time.
I made my way in slowly, taking in deep breaths to find my center. I needed to calm down, I told myself.
Launching into a hysterical rage would be highly counterproductive and only put my parents on firmer footing.
Papa was kneeling at the table, turning a cup of tea between his hands. I looked at him for a second before taking the place across from him. I didn't lower my head submissively, but rather stared at his face directly. The room wasn't well lit, and his dark coloring was made more ominous by the shadows cast from the two lamps in the corner. "Where were you?" he asked softly.
"Haru picked me up from school, saying we had to talk," I told him softly, and the very lack of expression in my voice was more telling than anything else I could have done.
Papa's fingers turned white around the cup from gripping it so hard. "What did he tell you?"
"Many things, but what he showed me was perhaps the most important. I figured most of it out on my own earlier." I ran my hands through my hair, letting the golden strands fall forward over my shoulders. "I always thought I was lucky, to have inherited Mama's hair. It's so unusual in Japan, being a blonde. I wondered why I never noticed Momiji had the same color?"
Papa set aside his cup, but it seemed like a burden had been lifted from his shoulders. "He told you everything?"
"He told me what he could, what he knew. Haru told me that Mama had her memory erased, which made most of the missing pieces fit. But why would she do that, I wondered?" I tossed my head, sending my hair cascading back in an eye-catching array. "Then Haru hugged me, and it became more clear."
He winced. "Haru... I never would have foreseen Haru getting involved until recently." He spoke in an undertone, as if the admission was something I wasn't supposed to hear but decided to answer anyway.
"I'm glad he did it." I almost told him of Momiji's reaction and what Yuki and Kyou had done afterwards, but I decided not to. Explaining anything would lesson my position of power. "Why, Papa? Why did you not keep Momiji? Why did you let Hatori erase Mama's memory?" I demanded.
Papa was silent, then he rose to his feet, coming around the table to he was kneeling next to me. "Momo, this is something that you can't begin to understand. It's something that..."
"Why can't I? You kept me and my brother apart my entire life! You rejected him!" I accused, flaring up. "You are horrible!"
"I never rejected Momiji! Momiji and I have always maintained a close relationship!" Papa snapped back almost instantly, and there was something fierce in his eyes, something I had only seen the time I had been in the hospital with a broken arm and the doctors had placed me in the waiting room. "I did everything I could for Momiji!"
"Why did you let Mama forget?"
"Because it was for the best," he whispered. "It was my fault. When she married into the clan, I didn't tell her about the curse because I didn't think it could possibly happen to us, having a cursed child, I mean. But it did - we had Momiji. He was born two months early, like all the cursed children, although I hoped he was only a premature baby. Then your mother hugged him and he transformed."
I wanted to ask what my brother's curse was, since Papa would know, but I remembered Haru had told me it was rude to ask what another's curse was and Yuki had told me to ask Momiji himself. I wasn't stupid enough to defy the clan head.
Papa, though, was lost in his memories. His face, still cast in those shadows, was lined with anguish. "Her scream lingers in my nightmares. I'll never forget it... a long, piercing wail of denial that echoed through the delivery room. It was at the Sohma hospital, though, so it was ignored. People knew that another of the Jyuunishi had been born."
"If it's only about being not able to hug him, why couldn't she accept it?" I asked icily.
"It is a terrible thing. Imagine not being able to touch a member of the opposite gender, for fear of being bumped into. Imagine never being able touch your mother. Imagine fearing illness, for being sick causes you to transform. Imagine this... then imagine the lives of the parents who shelter the child. Imagine a mother who believes she has given birth to something not quite human."
"That was Mama?"
"She called him an It, and was unable to stand being around him. Your Mama wasn't a strong woman to start with, but she got sick, and seemed to forget how to smile. I... I had to choose, Momo. Her life, or take the chance that she may accept Momiji someday..."
"Why? Why did you...." I whispered.
Papa's hands rested in his lap, but the knuckles were white from where he was holding onto the black fabric of his dress pants. "I've never heard of a mother accepting a Jyunishi after she's rejected the child. So I talked to Momiji, and we decided to take her to Hatori and help her forget him."
"You talked to Momiji?" I gasped. I hadn't realized that Momiji had been party to the decision.
"I did," he answered steadily. "Hw was four, and maybe he didn't understand what was going on, but I think he got most of it. Cursed children grow up faster than most."
A four year old? "So... you just gave him up after she forgot?"
"There was an emptiness in her face when she saw him, and it scared Momiji. I didn't realize it would be there, but Hatori had warned me. So I let Momiji live with the inner clan, and eventually your Mama could smile again. And then we had you, and it seemed like her heart had been repaired.
Repaired, but at what cost? I wondered. A thought occurred to me, and it turned my blood to ice even as the words tripped out over my tongue. "What if I had been cursed?" I whispered. "What would you have done if you couldn't have held me?"
Papa's hands shook . "That wouldn't have happened. That... wouldn't have happened."
"Is it impossible for two children to be cursed in the same immediate family?" I asked.
"No," he said. "Ayame and Yuki are both cursed. But you wouldn't have been cursed." He said this with true conviction.
"How do you know?" I demanded. "It could have happened!"
"You were planned," Papa told me. His eyes were bleak as he stared at me. "I planned it so that you wouldn't be born until after the last of the youngest Jyunishi was."
"Huh?" I couldn't think of anything more intelligent to say.
"After Momiji was born, I sat down and figured it out. Why... how? I wanted to see if there were any patterns, see why it had happened to my son, and no one else's... and the answer was that Momiji was simply born at the wrong time. Had he been born three weeks later, your cousin Sana would have been cursed, and he would have been normal. So I tried to figure our how your mother and I could have a child, since she wanted one. She didn't remember Momiji, and she wanted to have a child."
"How could you justify giving her a child, knowing what she had done to the first? Rejecting Momiji? What if..."
Papa looked at me with clear, cold eyes, and I saw someone there that frightened me. Someone ruthless, someone cold. Suddenly I realized how he could be the head of a multinational corporation, how he could allow Momiji to be given away, how he could justify mother's escape from her memory. He would stop at nothing to protect what he wanted, and damn the consequences. He reached out and tilted my chin back, using the same type of grip Haru had used to keep me from looking away from an unpleasant truth. "I figured out how to avoid the curse."
"How?" I demanded.
"The Jyunishi cycles. Every generation has its own Jyunishi and God. The cycle for this Jyunishi began with the birth of Sohma Hatori, followed by Ayame and Shigure. The generations are closely linked - even if one of the Jyunishi is killed by accident, the flow of time will correct itself within a cycle or two - that animal will either become very long-lived or accident prone. That's why the Jyunishi are all within fifteen years of each other right now."
"So what does that have to do with me?" I demanded.
Papa released my chin. "I waited until the cycle was complete. When Sohma Hiro was born, and cursed with the Ram, I knew the chances of you being cursed were minute. All the curses had been claimed for this generation, barring accident."
It was such a methodological, cold way to bring me into the world. "You're ruthless," I said.
"After what happened to Momiji, can you blame me?" my father asked. His eyes were dark and remorseless, though I saw tension along his jaw line. "I had lost one child through my arrogance. I was not about to lose another."
I was seeing a side of my father I didn't like. I had been wrong to ever think of him as weak. He was cold and calculating, like so many in our family. This side of him was one I did not like. "Papa... if you regret Momiji so much, why didn't you ever try to do anything to make it up to him?"
"I did my best. Members of the family have looked after him, and I've always met him every Saturday after school for lunch, until he went to college. He'd stop by my office for a while, and I'd did my best to attend his events and parties... sometimes they clashed with events your mother was holding, and I couldn't make it. But he knew I loved him. Momiji is a perceptive person."
Yes, he was, I thought, and my hands clenched. I wondered how many times Papa had chosen one of my events over Momiji's, or had chosen to spend time with his "real" family instead of his son. My heart ached with pain for my older brother, so long left on his own. It wasn't fair to either of us, to have been denied each other's company. "You love me more than you love Momiji, don't you?" I asked.
"Of course not! I love you equally! It's just I get to express it with you, you just don't understand how it is, how it was... what there is between us." Papa looked pained, and he shut his eyes before taking a deep breath. "Momiji is the greatest regret of my life," he admitted to me. "If I could do it all differently, I might, but we can't change the past. Whenever I see him, I hurt. I hurt for him, I hurt for your mother, I hurt for myself."
This was not the father I loved. This could not be the proud, strong man who always seemed to have the world under his control, and be capable of fixing everything. I was losing him, losing my faith in his abilities, and I was angry at him for it. I wanted to hurt him. "What about me?" I snapped. "If I'm so precious to you, didn't it ever occur to you that I'd want to know my older brother?" I asked. I clenched my fists to my side, trying to keep from lashing out physically as well.
He flinched. "Of course it did!" he said, and his voice cracked. "I thought about it every time you turned your head a certain way, every time you laughed! Your voices sound the same! But some things just can't be. You can't understand..."
"Because I'm not cursed? Neither are you!"
It happened too fast for me to follow.
CRASH!
The sound of glass shattered, then a sudden pain in my cheek as a something sliced through it. Papa's horrified realization that he had hurt me, however inadvertently. On the floor by the wall was the remnants of the shattered teacup he had thrown in his rage, unable to think of anything to do in his defense against my honesty.
I stared at him in surprise, though I knew I had pushed him to it. "Ouch," I said calmly, unable to think of anything else. My hand came to my cheek, coming away with the red stickiness of blood. The cut was a shallow one, and I knew it would heal without much effort, but he had inflicted it on me. Through his loss of control, my father had hurt me.
His hands shook as they came towards me, obviously wanting to inspect the damage. His face was colorless, but I flinched away. My eyes didn't waver as I drew back from him, though a large part of me just wanted to run up to my room and start bawling. I was determined to see this through.
"Momo..." he said. "I'm so sorry. Let's get it cleaned."
My fingers fell away, but I knew I would be feeling the phantom pain of that cut for years to come, long after it healed.. We had crossed a line, drawn our sides, and we weren't in the same place anymore. We had lashed out at each other, and though I knew we would reconcile, someday, I didn't see it happening anytime soon. Things would never be the same, and I mourned for my innocence. I knew he could betray a child now. What would he have done, had I been born cursed?
"I'm going to go clean this on my own." I took a deep breath. "Otousan, I don't want to talk to you anymore right now. I... I want my brother. I don't know what kind of person he really is, but I don't think he'd hurt me. You..." I looked at him, shaking my head, unable to bring my feelings to words. "I don't think I want to talk to you anytime soon."
Papa had aged during our argument, and as I looked at him, I thought I saw the beginnings of wrinkles form around the corners of his eyes. It took a moment for me to get up the willpower to leave, but I turned to go.
"Momo?"
"Yes, Otousan?" I replied, not turning to face him.
I could picture his wince. I had always used "papa" instead of the Japanese "Otousan" and I knew he felt the barrier between us rise. "What are you going to tell your mother?"
"Nothing," I replied. "I don't think I want to speak to her, either."
"Momo..." he whispered, struggling to find the words. I hesitated on the threshold, hoping he'd say something to make it all better, but knowing he wouldn't. "There was no right answer at that time. Sometimes in this life, there is no absolute truth, and you choose what will hurt the fewest people. Momoji may hurt, but wouldn't her hurt more if you okaasan had died?"
I raced out of the room. I had had it with his excuses.
As I lay on my bed that night, I wondered if my mother would question the change in me. I knew I wouldn't be able to look at her the same way, knowing she could forget a child, forget my brother, because the sight of him disgusted her...
Would they have forgotten me, had I been the cursed one? It was on that discomforting thought that I slipped into the oblivion of sleep.
When I woke up the next morning, I felt as though I hadn't slept at all. I had spent the night tossing and turning, and it hadn't been restful. I washed up and brushed my hair before putting my uniform on. I really didn't want to go to school, but I wanted to stay home even less.
Mama was downstairs, humming as she cooked breakfast. "Are eggs okay, Momo?" she asked me. She was fond of western breakfasts due to her German origin.
I looked at her, dressed in the "Kiss the Cook" apron and neat clothes and wondered how she could live with herself. Didn't she know something had been missing from her life? "Just toast," I told her.
"Are you sure?" she asked as I went to pour myself a glass of milk.
"Yes."
She cocked an eyebrow curiously. Usually I was bubbly with plans for the day, eager to share confidences with her, but today I was moody and sullen, and keeping to myself. She stared at me long and hard and I knew she wanted to ask me what was wrong, but her instincts warned her I would bite her head off if she tried.
She set the toast in front of me, and was about to turn away when she noticed the long, thin scratch on my face. "Momo... what happened?" she asked, pointing to it.
"I got cut. It's nothing."
Papa shifted uneasily in his chair. He was eating his meal with little appetite. I noticed him poking at the omelette and stared at him with hard eyes. He ruffled the newspapers before him a bit before looking at me. His eyes were measuring and I knew we weren't going to be comfortable around each other for ages. "Are you going to do anything after school today?" he asked after a second.
"Maybe, maybe not," I answered noncommittally.
Mama added orange juice to my meal. "You have to be more specific than that, Momo," she told me. "We need to keep track of your whereabouts."
"Yes, keeping track of children is something parents are responsible for," I said softly, my very lack of expression more cutting than a rage would have been.
Papa just stared at me, not missing my point. "Momo, this is not the time or place."
"It never is," I said. Rising to my feet, I stared at my parents. "I'm going to leave now."
"This early?" Mama asked in surprise. She looked at me, then at my father, sensing something was intensely wrong and having no clue how to fix it.
"I have things..." I started to say, but was interrupted by the sharp chime of the telephone.
Papa reached over blindly and picked it up. I was about to use it as a chance to escape, but something made me pause. "Sohma residence. Yes? Yes... no, he hasn't. No... I don't think... yes, I knew. Yes, she spoke to me... I'll let you know." Papa set the phone down, staring at me, and I could see he was trying to decide whether or not to tell me some bad news.
"You'd better let me know," I said. "No more secrets, Papa."
Mother watched both of us, nibbling on her lip, but we ignored her. This was Sohma business, and as Haru had told me on the night of the engagement party, Mama could never be one of us.
I was Sohma. I would know the truth.
Papa nodded slowly, bowing his head in resignation. "That was Hatori. Momiji is missing. It seems no one has seen him since last night."
END PART SEVEN
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Author's Notes:
Teenage rebellion - gotta love it! Now, Momo may have had a better REASON than most, but getting into a brew ha ha with her tousan...
And Momiji is missing. ^_~ Ain't that just a cliffhanger worthy of the EMSiT name from my Sailor Moon days?
Credit as always to Xandra for the beta, and Merrow for the discussion and keeping me from walking TOO much in Momo's head.