Ahaha, I forgot to do a disclaimer for chapter one, so here it is now: I do not own Fruits Basket. I do own my own original characters, though. And the plot for this story.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, this story takes place during the anime's story line. As of right now, we're not too far in - Tohru has just recently found out about the curse herself and has just moved into Shigure's house.

Speaking of the other characters, you'll see them in due time. This story may be a bit slow going and have minimal canon character interaction at first, but it will eventually pick up.

Also another thing to note; while I will be mostly following the anime plot line(with a few manga elements thrown in later), this fic will eventually branch away from canon. Seeing as it centers around an OC, it is likely that some things will be changed.

Anyway, before I forget, I'd like to mention Les Miserabby, who has beta-read both this chapter and the first one. Just thought I'd get that out there. Thanks again! :D

Chapter 2...begin!

~ Insert Title Here ~

~ Chapter Two ~

"And how was school today, kid?" Shoko's father, Takumi, asked as the family sat down for dinner that night.

Shoko pushed around a bit of the meat on her plate, only stopping when her mother gave her a scolding look. "It was good, I guess," she mumbled in response, glancing up for a moment to meet her father's green-eyed gaze before fixating her attention back onto her food.

"You guess?" Takumi echoed, raising an eyebrow, "Shoko, did something happen at school today?"

The brunette child started, before shaking her head rapidly. "No," she denied, refusing to meet either of her parents' eyes. Naturally, this worried them, and her mother placed her hand on her daughter's shoulder firmly.

"Shoko, what's wrong?" The woman demanded, looking at her sternly.

"Nothing." Shoko muttered, wanting to brush away her mother's hand but knowing she would be lectured about rudeness if she did. It wasn't worth it.

"You're lying. What did I say to you about telling lies?" Hideko refused to let the subject drop. Her honey-brown eyes, so similar to Shoko's, bore into her daughter.

"Hideko, maybe she doesn't want to talk about it right now. Leave her be." Takumi said, eyeing his wife.

Shoko heard her mother scoff, and her stomach dropped as the older woman shot back a retort, "It's our responsibility to make sure our child is excelling at school. If there's something wrong, we can't just 'leave it be'."

"Shoko will tell us in her own time if there's something bothering her," her father insisted, his tone irritated, "Right, kiddo?" He addressed his daughter directly, turning his bright green hues onto her.

"Yeah," Shoko mumbled, nibbling at her food. Her appetite was waning quickly.

"See? Everything is fine," Takumi stated, as if that would put an end to the conversation.

But Hideko would have none of that. She glared at the man and said sharply, "Come now, Takumi, do you really think it works like that? Children Shoko's age aren't brave enough to openly-"

"Would you two just stop it?" The entire room fell silent at Shoko's sudden outburst. The young girl wasn't looking at either of them, but she was quite clearly glaring daggers at her plate. The grip on her eating utensils was tight, turning her knuckles white.

Without waiting for a response, the brunette started up again, "All you two do is argue about everything. Why can't you just get along for even one family meal? Why do you always have to do this?" Her eyes stung, but she resisted the urge to cry. Bursting into tears now wouldn't help matters, it would just divert everyone's attention from the main problem.

"Shoko..." her mother and father spoke at the same time, her father's tone worried, but her mother's tone came out sounding like a warning.

"I'm tired of it," she muttered, "I don't want to listen to you fight anymore." Shoko still refused to look up and meet anyone's eyes. She felt like she would completely lose it if she did.

"I'm going to my room." She abruptly announced, standing up from her chair and leaving the table. "I have homework."

Her parents watched her go with different expressions; Takumi looked affronted, like he didn't expect his daughter to be aware of the growing rift between him and Hideko; and Hideko herself just looked moody and a bit surprised.

As far as Shoko was concerned, she was done with this. She didn't expect things to miraculously fix themselves, or for her parents to suddenly decide they loved each other again.

Those were foolish dreams; fleeting wishes that she had once entertained herself with.

She knew better now.

Whatever was wrong with her mother and father...it couldn't be fixed.

"WHAT?!" The exclamation burst from her lips a second time, and Shoko herself was soon back up on her feet and about five steps away from the talking rat in record time.

What the hell was this?!

"This is rather unfortunate," the rat spoke in a soft, almost unhappy voice while the girl nearby nearly hyperventilated out of shock, "And here I thought the building was empty."

Shoko placed a hand to her chest. Her heart was hammering at a rapid pace, and her eyes were blown wide open in disbelief. Her mind was racing a million miles per second, trying to figure out just what this was supposed to be.

"Wha...what is going on?! Why is there a talking rat?! Am I knocked out or am I going insane? This can't happening, this, this can't even be real!" The brunette clutched at her head and stared at the small rodent with comically wide eyes. Her brain and thought process was beyond frazzled right now. She wasn't prepared to deal with something like this, whatever this even was.

She tried to take in deep breaths to steady herself and regain some sort of calmness.

"Okay, okay, calm down Shoko," she mumbled to herself almost hysterically, missing the way the rat sweatdropped at her and tried to get her attention with its soft voice, "there has to be a rational explanation. You can't have gone off the deep end, last time you checked you were perfectly sane. You're probably just unconscious, and this is all a strange dream. Yeah...yeah, that makes sense." She began to mumble incoherent sentences of reassurance to herself, even nodding to punctuate each word.

Meanwhile the rat, sitting alone and forgotten among the crumpled Kaibara uniform, sighed. He was more exasperated than bothered at this point, mostly at the girl who was trying to pretend he wasn't sitting here not two feet away.

"Miss..." he said, moving a step toward said girl. She didn't reply. "Miss...Shoko?" That was what she had called herself, right?

He was about to call out to her again, but the poor rat was interrupted by a rather unexpected 'POOF' of purple cloud, and nearly groaned aloud at the horrible timing.

Shoko's ramblings fell silent and her eyes resumed their wide-open status. Her mind blanked and she felt her jaw drop, a thin squeaking/wheezing noise escaping her throat.

'I don't even know what's going on anymore.' She thought and suddenly stiffened. She spun around quickly, red dusting her face and ear-tips. 'First there was a boy, then there was a rat, and now there's a boy again - a goddamn naked boy!'

"What the hell is this?" She whispered hoarsely to herself, shaken. "I don't even..."

A few moments passed in that fashion, with Shoko standing rigid with her back facing the boy behind her. After a few moments of utter silence, she figured that maybe he had left, and she allowed her shoulders to relax slightly. But she hesitated when the thought of turning around came to mind.

And for good reason, too. The poor girl screeched in surprise and jumped three feet into the air when she felt a light tap on her shoulder and heard a soft voice say, "Excuse me, Miss...?"

Recovering slightly, Shoko whipped around and found herself face to face with the very topic of her conversation with Nami over lunch earlier that day.

Prince Yuki Sohma.

For a moment, all she could do was stare. She'd never been this up close to this boy before, but now that she was, all she could notice was how soft and almost feminine his facial features were. In short, if she were to label this boy as anything, she would have to say that he looked - dare she even think the word - beautiful.

And then she mentally slapped herself for allowing herself to get distracted by his pretty looks. Now wasn't the time to be ogling him, this person who had been a boy, and then a rat, and then a boy again!

Oh, how ridiculous that sounded...it couldn't possibly have been real, right?

Flushing a mild shade of red again, the brunette teen risked a quick glance downwards from his face, just double checking that he was actually wearing clothes now, and she held in a sigh of relief when she saw that he was. Thank goodness.

When she saw that he was about to open his mouth and say something, she felt a strange surge of panic and cut him off before he could even begin. "No, no! Wait just a second and don't say anything!"

He furrowed his brows faintly at her in response, and merely listened in silence as she swept on, "Don't say a word about what just happened, alright? It wasn't real. I imagined the whole thing, so if you don't mind, I would rather you didn't shatter that thin line between reality and insanity and just let me pretend like it was all some sort of crazy hallucination spawned from knocking my head too hard against the floor. Okay?"

Shoko gave him a half-glare as she fell silent. She was really hoping he would decide to be cooperative and just keep his mouth shut on the matter, but she had a feeling...it wasn't going to be that easy.

Yuki sighed again. This wasn't going quite how he had been expecting it to, considering that the girl in front of him seemed fixated on maintaining a mindset that was clearly in denial about everything. And she was even aware of that fact.

"I'm sorry Miss...Shoko, but I don't think that the situation is that simple..." he trailed off, noticing how the shorter brunette didn't seem to be paying any attention to what he was saying. "Miss Shoko."

Shoko heard what he had said, but she refused to acknowledge it. Why couldn't he understand that this all would be made so much easier if he just let it drop? "Look," she said firmly, locking her eyes onto his as she channeled her mother's irritable stern persona, "I'm willing to act like this never happened, so if you just play along, it'll be fine."

She valued her peace of mind, thank you very much. There was no room for something like this in her world. She'd drive herself up a wall trying to figure out the meaning behind everything if she allowed it to really sink into her brain. She would rather just remain as ignorant as possible. Or at least give that illusion of ignorance.

Yuki didn't seem to share the same opinion as her though, and he seemed persistent in pushing the matter. "You need to listen to me," was his tone getting...irritated, or was that just her? "This a very serious matter, Miss Shoko. You might tell someone else, and-"

"Who the hell would I tell? No, scratch that, who would even believe something like this? Even I'm having a hard time digesting it." The honey-brown eyed girl said, sounding incredulous.

"You would be surprised at who might believe you." Well, didn't those words sound ominous.

Shoko shook her head stubbornly. "No. I don't want to talk about this anymore. I have to get home." She took a step away from the boy, who watched her movements with a strange look in his eye.

"Please, Miss Shoko-" he started, almost pleading, but she would have none of it.

"I said no!" And then she was bolting down the hall, away from the strange boy and his strange girly looks.

They both knew he could probably catch up to her if he tried, but for some reason he stayed rooted to the spot. He watched her flee, until she rounded a corner and was out of view.

He sighed.

What was he supposed to do now?

"Damn, damn, damn it all!" Shoko cursed at herself furiously, crouching down with her back leaning against the side of a brick building, panting from the exertion and trying to catch her breath. She had fled from Yuki Sohma and hadn't stopped running until she was out of the school and more than halfway home.

And she didn't even have the textbook she needed and had forgotten about.

"Way to go, Shoko," she muttered at herself angrily, "now you're going to be in big trouble tomorrow, again. Damn it!"

Once her breathing had evened out some, she stood up shakily and observed her surroundings. She had chosen to stop and rest against a small convenience store, partway into the alley, she noted. Drawing in a deep breath, she emerged back out onto the sidewalk, acting like she hadn't been bolting along at breakneck speed up until this point.

When her house came into view - just a modest, two-story building - she exhaled a burdened sigh. Now she could go to her room and bury herself in her sheets; and hopefully forget about what had happened today.

Yeah right.

Upon walking into the house and announcing, "I'm home!" out loud, she was met with silence. Her mother must still be at work, then.

Dumping her bag by the stairs to deal with later, Shoko went up to her room and immediately went for her bed upon entering. Her head hit the soft pillows and she sighed in contentment, closing her eyes for a moment.

Peaceful quiet was all she was aware of for the time being, and a small smile stretched out across her lips as she allowed herself to relax.

Ah, sweet, sweet, peace and quiet...

Unfortunately, it wasn't fated to last, because at that moment, her mind chose to travel back in time to the bizarre situation she had found herself in back in Kaibara's hallways.

Her smile contorted into a displeased frown, and her eyes snapped open. "No," she scolded herself while sitting up, "I won't think about that. I won't."

But her memory refused to listen to her. It didn't matter what she did; images of a boy, a 'POOF' noise and purple clouds, followed by a talking rat kept plaguing her thoughts. She couldn't shake it off.

"Ugh!" Shoko flopped back down onto her bed and threw her pillow over her face. "Why did Yuki Sohma of all people have to be in that exact hall at that exact time?! By mere coincidence? Yeah right...fate is aspiring against me today, I swear!" She suddenly recalled the conversation she had with Nami during lunch. "Or maybe this is karma being a bitch for talking about him behind his back!"

Growling, the girl suddenly ripped the pillow away from her face and stood up from her bed. She stomped her way out of her room and down the stairs, to where her schoolbag had been left unceremoniously. She picked it up, made her way toward the dining table where she plopped herself down and dug out her homework - or whatever she could dig out, anyway. That stupid textbook sitting back in her classroom was probably mocking her right now.

Anyway, if her mind couldn't think about anything else other than what had transpired with the Prince of her high school, then she'd drown out all of those annoying thoughts with some good old hard, cold math equations.

Anything to keep her mind off of that.

School the next day was, simply put, boring, but at the same time, eventful.

Everywhere she went, she was careful that Yuki Sohma was not there either. When it came time to going to the classes she shared with the boy, she avoided all eye contact like she would die if she so much as met his purple-eyed gaze.

And Shoko could feel - or she thought she could, at least - his eyes on her during those times. Maybe it was her imagination overreacting, but she wasn't going to take the risk of finding out.

Her own cowardice unnerved her almost as much as the boy she was trying to avoid. She wasn't normally like this; if there was a problem, she usually confronted head on, not flee from it. But in a way, it did make some sense. Since the issue itself wasn't a normal one, she supposed the fact that she was acting this way wasn't completely out of character.

After all, was there anyone that would act normally after seeing what she had?

Shoko was surprised, to say the least, when she made it to lunch without being confronted. She and Nami ate at their usual spot on the roof, the sound of idle chatter and the dark haired girl cracking jokes that the other girl would smile and chuckle half-heartedly at surrounding them.

At one point Nami bluntly asked her, "What's eating you?" when Shoko merely gave a forced grin in response to a pun she had made.

"W-what? Nothing. I just didn't do my history homework last night and I'm not looking forward to that class..." Shoko knew her reply was less than believable, but Nami just frowned a bit in reply before grinning again and going back to her animated speech.

Shoko sighed and picked at her lunch, casting a wary look around the rooftop.

By the end of the school day, her nerves and paranoia were all but eating her alive. She'd made it through all of her classes - though her history teacher had assigned her extra homework for not doing yesterday's - with no sign of the Prince.

It was just as she was leaving the building that she realized her luck had run out - because the very person she had been dodging all day was standing at the school's front doors. He wasn't paying much attention to the swarm of students brushing past him to leave, and the only reason Shoko had been able to spot him was because he was the only person not moving among everyone who was.

The brunette teen gulped at the sight of him and felt a surge of annoyance mixed with fear. Why was he standing there like that? He couldn't possibly be waiting for her, right?

It didn't take long for her to realize - with a rush of relief - that she was wrong. Shoko watched as Yuki was approached by a girl with long brown hair and pretty blue eyes. The two exchanged a few words with each other, and then they both turned to leave.

But not before the boy's eyes suddenly locked with her own for just a second, and she stiffened. Those eyes blinked at her, and much to the honey-brown eyed girl's surprise, he shot her a single, polite smile before turning his back to her and leaving side by side with the girl from before.

Shoko blinked, shocked and confused by what had just happened. She had thought he would want to talk with her. She had thought he would have at least something to say to her, but all he did was smile? Why?

She grumbled something under her breath and narrowed her eyes. "It was probably because he was waiting for that girl," she frowned, "or maybe he decided it wasn't worth it and is leaving me alone."

She hoped it was because of the second reason. She really, really hoped it was the second reason. She wasn't all that fond of the idea of a person being able to turn into a rat, and even less fond of the notion that she may now be involved in something less than normal. As if she needed one extra thing like this to worry about.

At least for now she was safe. Safe from what, she couldn't say, but Shoko had a feeling she couldn't keep dodging bullets like she'd been doing all day.

Scary as it sounded, she knew she was going to get hit sooner or later.

She only hoped that it wouldn't hurt too much when she did.

Curiosity had been nagging at the girl and when she finally couldn't take it anymore, Tohru asked, "So who was that girl you were smiling at, Yuki?" The girl in question had looked familiar...maybe a classmate?

The boy confirmed her thoughts when he replied, "Just a classmate I had the pleasure of talking to yesterday."

Tohru blinked at that and smiled. "Is she nice?"

Yuki paused at her question and thought back to yesterday, and what she had told him. "Look, I'm willing to act like this never happened, so if you just play along, it'll be fine."

She had seemed so desperate to have him not say anything about what she had obviously witnessed. It was...quite odd.

To answer Tohru's question, Yuki replied without thinking, "Yes, I'm sure she is..."

But that wasn't the honest truth, was it?

The truth was, Yuki didn't know what to say about that girl.

He didn't even know what to think of her.

She had thrown him for a loop with her reaction to his curse. He knew he should probably tell Shigure about what had happened yesterday, but he couldn't bring himself to. Maybe it was because of that look he had noticed in her eyes had shocked him so much? Or maybe it was something completely different.

Images of his past flashed through is mind, of a younger him and his friends whose memories had to be erased because of the curse.

No, Yuki didn't know a thing when it came to that girl.

What he did know, however, was that he didn't want her to lose her memory because of a simple accident, like those children so long ago.

He didn't want that to happen to anyone ever again.

And that's a wrap!

...man, I'm so not used to writing chapters this long. Usually my writing comes in shorter bursts, maybe 1,000 words per update, but this story...no, I can't seem to do that. It's not a bad thing, I suppose. It's just different.

Well anyway!

Thank you to the following people who have reviewed/faved/followed:

- Les Miserabby

- Queen Ore-sama

So that's all for now, everyone. Feel free to drop me a review telling me what you thought.

See you all next time!

~TheAzuraStar