Author's Note: Well, this revision has gone through a full-scale revision, thanks to Bean who insists that I never finish stories. But I will finish this one, and it will be the only stroy that I ever finish. Kedding, kedding... XD I'll get around to my other stories soon, but I've got no time at the moment to do more than a couple things at once. In fact, I'm supposed to be doing homework now. See if you can read the original Curse of Loneliness, and then compare it to this one to see how well I have done. Ciao!
The curse, for so long, had rested so heavily that it smothered all love in the Sohma family. It had isolated them all, each within his own little bundle of fake feelings and shaky emotions. The family was individually withdrawn, self-conscious, insecure. The curse had trapped them, trapped them all in that kind of prison that makes you give up looking for an escape. It had trapped the young ones into thinking that they would grow up without love like the older ones, and trapped the older ones into feeling pain as they watched the younger ones grow up without love just like them. In truth, the whole turning-into-a-Zodiac-animal thing was just a side effect of the real curse, one that the family made a big deal about because it was inconvenient. But the real curse was a secret, kept safe inside the borders of Akito's twisted mind. The real curse of the Sohma family…was loneliness.
Then came the girl that might change all that.
She was impossible not to like. Her nature was that of a sweet cherub in springtime, bubbly with laughter and decorated with lovable apologies. She was pleasant, innocent and naïve in a completely enticing way. Her cheerfulness was a filter, sucking in all the bad things about her and changing them into enough gaiety to visibly fill a room with. She was selfless and worried about details of the lives of others that wouldn't have caught Buddha's attention. She tried so hard, and was so happy when others were happy, that it was nearly unfeasible not to adore her. But Akito had a tendency towards being unpredictable, and so he did not love her. He hated her. He hated her for her attraction, for her magnetic personality. He hated her for her alluring nature, her infectious cheer. He hated her because if he didn't, he would fall in love with her.
If he loved her, all would be lost. If he loved her then the curse would be broken, and his power over the Sohmas would disappear like sand in the sea. If he loved her, he would relinquish his grasp on the delicate empire he had built out of the Zodiac. He would lose control on the precious kingdom he had worked so hard to construct, to craft out of raw materials. If he loved her, he would lose his barrier to the outside world. And so, to keep himself from loving her, he forced himself to hate her.
He refused to love her by hating her. It was the only way he would be safe. He couldn't just let her be, ignore her, passively hope she would soon cease to be a problem, or she might slip into his heart.
So he hated her as best he could. But somehow, due to some strange emotion lurking deep in the depths of what could only be called his heart for lack of a better word, he could never bring himself to say it out loud.
He hated her. He watched closely over the young ones, in case they grew too attached to this beautiful girl with the optimistic smile and the naïve demeanor that made you laugh. And he warned all the adults, although he was quite sure they didn't believe him, that she was temptation in disguise, just waiting for the moment when they were all dancing in her hands like puppets. The Sirens, from mythology, were a perfect analogy. Akito was quite pleased with it, as it reassured him that he really did hate her not just for the sake of not loving her, but because he was powerful enough to resist her. She'd call out to the Sohma sailors with beckoning smiles and deceptive sanguinity, and they'd drown in an ocean of imagined hope. The perfect name for her, a name Akito began to subconsciously connect with her face. The Siren.
But God knows that Sirens can often enough prove to be irresistible.
He tried to bring himself to order the Dragon to erase all her memories. It was the perfect solution, flawless, save for one thing. Although the girl might be gone in her own mind, she would never be gone from the minds of the Sohmas. She would always be there, lurking. His only hope was that they'd see that she was too painful to remember, and turn their minds to other subjects when on a dangerous track.
So he tried to order the Dragon. To erase all her memories, all traces of the Zodiac, to wipe all fragments of the curse—that would be near perfection. But he never quite got around to mentioning it. He knew on the surface it would be infinitely better, his reign would last infinitely longer if she was removed as an obstacle, if the threat that she posed was gone. But he knew he could never do that. There was still that one part of him, that fragment of him that he banished to the darkness, the bit that begged to be saved…
So he let her be. He let her keep her memories, keep her dangerous friendships with the rest of the Sohmas against all better judgment. He settled for merely hating her. Always inside, smoldering with the silent explosiveness of a smoke bomb, merely hating her.
It was because he merely hated her that he was defeated. It was because he merely hated her that he was saved.