Say Her Name
A Fruits Basket fanfic by Rabid Lola
A/N: Slight Kyoru. Sorry, wanted to poke fun at the way Kyou never (well, practically never…) says her name. :)
…---…
The psychic girl asks the weirdest questions. Says the weirdest things.
They're specifically designed to throw one off-balance, aren't they?
Blank countenance focusing, for one sharp moment, on an orange-headed boy with a not-hidden suspicious expression. "Why do you never say Tohru-kun's name?"
One neko stares in panic. "What!"
Sometimes, these questions or statements just come floating to her out of nowhere. A prompting, then. Sometimes, it is personal curiosity and the instinct to speak out.
Sometimes—like in this case—it's both.
"You never say Tohru-kun's name."
Kyou is defensive, as always. But, she notices interestedly, more decidedly so now. "Where the hell did that come from! What's it to you if I don't!"
She shrugs. "I just happened to notice."
"Well…well stop noticing!" He flounces back to the work before them. Why, oh why did he have to get stuck with her for a partner on this project? And it so happened that she decided to come over and finish it when she is out on her part-time job, and the damn nezumi on some meeting, and the stupid inu annoying his editor.
"It's just odd, that you are friends with Tohru-kun, live in the same house with her, go to the same school and are classmates, and yet you never call her by name. Or say it. Why is that?" She looks at him through half-lidded eyes as her hands nimbly cut and paste (a few bland, dry facts on the black side of an illustration board). "Should I be thinking—anything of it?"
Kyou leaps up and points at her angrily, and for a moment she can almost fancy angry cat ears (Cat? Why cat, of all creatures?) popping up on his head. "Will you and that damn Yankee stop adding extra meaning to everything me—and that damn Yuki—do about…her!"
"Her? Her who?" she inquires mildly.
He nearly explodes in frustration. "You know who I mean!"
Her hands still, and she lets them rest in her lap as she fixes him with her blank-deep-black gaze again. And he steps back, a little fearful, remembering a day in a graveyard when she'd read more of him than he liked…
"Say her name." It's a command.
He stiffens. "What?"
"Say. Her. Name."
He's red, she can see, from all the suppressed emotion anger embarrassment (and something…?) she can feel vibrating, pulsating in his electric signals. It's strong, very strong, but she's strong too, and she presses down on him, pressuring him, even as he says, "I don't want to!"
"Don't want to what?" She's trying to infuriate him, he knows it.
"Say…her name!"
Why? But she will know why, she thinks, if she can just get him to… "Whose name?"
"Hers!"
"Whose?" Why?
"Hers!" And, so suddenly and so soon that she has to admit she's surprised, he gives in, (Did he want to?) and mumbles, "Tohru's."
"Whose, again?" she says quietly (gently). It wasn't loud enough, apparently.
He growls in exasperation and fed-up annoyance, but even that can't roughen his voice when he says, again, "Tohru." And he knows it.
He fixes crimson eyes on her and asks waspishly, "There. Happy now?"
She gazes calmly at him for a little while longer, just to keep him on his toes. Then, she bends to their project again. "Ah. It's it."
"Eh? WHAT'S IT!"
But she says nothing, and no matter how loud he gets, he can't make her say any more about it. (Oh, she takes such amusement in this.)
The psychic girl asks the weirdest questions. Says the weirdest things.
They're specifically designed to keep people off balance.
Or maybe…to make them think about what she said, and realize…
Things.
…--EnD--…