Not My Mother's Hair:

A Series of Vignettes from the Diary of Akito Sohma

A Fruits Basket/Furuba Fanfiction

Chapter One

DISCLAIMER: WARNING, MANGA SPOILERS AFTER CHAPTER 98 IN THE DISCLAIMER! "Fruits Basket/Furuba" in its anime and manga formats are the creation and property of Takaya Natsuki and I in NO WAY claim ownership or profit thereof.

RATED PG FOR SWEARING AND MATURE THEMES (DEATH, CHILDHOOD TRAUMA).

This story lightly explores Akito Sohma's change-of-heart in the manga and her subsequent possible attempts to make amends with various family members. It is told from Akito's POV. If you still dislike her even after the manga brilliantly illustrates her personal pains and makes her a sympathetic character, take your cold heart elsewhere and don't bother to read this story, LOL.

If you do not believe that positive regard would ever occur between Tohru and Akito, you have only to acknowledge that THE MANGA ITSELF proposes peace and new friendship between them, in chapters 120-130 (released in Japan only as of July 2006). Don't flame me for sticking to CANON.

In this fanfiction, which will be comprised of SEVERAL SHORT CHAPTERS, Akito Sohma's gender is FEMALE, in correspondence with MANGA CANON POST-CHAPTER-98. The story depends HEAVILY on the MANGA as opposed to the anime.

This story takes place AFTER THE EVENTS OF CHAPTER 131 OF THE MANGA: Therefore the Sohmas are FREE from the Zodiac Curse and Akito is no longer dying.

WARNING: I SHIP CANON ONLY, WHICH MEANS I SHIP SHIGURE X AKITO, TOHRU X KYO, AND KURENO X ARISA. If you do not appreciate these pairings, refrain from reading this fanfiction and do not waste your time flaming me.

While I will probably never have time to revise this story, PLEASE ENJOY, R&R!

Seven months and nine days since Shigure kissed me and kissed me, slowly slid my kimono off my body and pulled me against him, seven months and nine days since a tender dance between bedsheets expressed our love for each other and planted a child within me.

I am terrified and elated. Hope will be born, hope and change. This from the young woman who had thought herself doomed to an embittered and premature death only a few years ago. So I will gladly pardon you, and "eat my hat" as they say, if you laugh incredulously at what seems a ridiculous declaration. I suppose God will forgive you for being so cynical; even though my body housed a god for a period of over 19 years, I am no expert, but I would assume so. In any case, here it goes:

I am happy, I am married, I am pregnant, I am surrounded by a family that stays with me of its own free will, and therefore, I am starting over. Even though I have no redemptive features, even though I have nothing in my past but pain. I am starting over.

You would not think that this serendipity came directly proceeding a cruel berating by my own mother, but fate is strange when it comes to my life and family.

Though it has been my destiny to dress and behave like a man until fairly recently (thank fortune for my naturally textured, contralto purr of a voice) in order to fulfill my traditional inherited role as Head of the Sohma family, I have lately thrown caution to the wind and allowed my androgyny to be replaced by a mild…subtle…strain of femininity (it seemed useless, anyhow, to maintain the male guise, for I've never heard of a pregnant man). My cousins Rin and Kagura, and my dear new friend Tohru's schoolmates Arisa and Saki, have taught me the disturbingly elaborate art of mascara and nail polish. I have reluctantly allowed pastels into my wardrobe, as well as a single pair of high heels and a purse. I have discovered the bra and quite frankly marveled at its multiform varieties. We humans have excessive free time on our hands, it seems.

Shigure enjoys all of these changes immensely. He likes to growl teasingly at me like a middle school boy when I walk past in a black tank top and long dark skirt. He becomes very enthusiastic if I venture into the realms of jewelry and lipstick (this is still most rare). My dear Gure-Ko, he can't help his…amorous urges. And he has stopped lecherously chanting about high school girls, which I appreciate. I do love him, very much. He knows the crevices of my soul and he moves heaven and hell to make me laugh, always, no matter how he feels or what he is going through. I wasted many years being angry with my other self, my Shigure. But in my defense, he was even more wasteful and reckless with those same years apart from me. Ultimately, though…mistakes can be placed firmly beside us, and simply endured, as we move forward. This is the beauty of being alive.

Unfortunately it was because of my new grasp of mascara that my mother chose to gnaw on my self-confidence tonight. It was such a brief conversation, as I sat in the bathroom applying the black makeup to eyelashes I never realized I had, and she slipped up behind me in another of her sluttish red dresses. Her breasts spilled forward tastelessly in the mirror. She stank of cheap perfume. My morning sickness has lasted far past my first trimester, and the sweet oppressiveness of her scent made my stomach turn. Somehow I think she realized this.

"How attractive," my mother snickered. I hate her eyes. They are twice as pale as mine, a pale algae sort of green, and just as murky. "You are playing dress-up again. What is that? Black nail polish? From that strange Hanajima girl, no doubt. Do you think that sucking up to those cows and their cute, common, plastic ways will ingratiate you, Akito?"

I had mastered the application of the mascara without getting a single streak on the skin of my eyelids, but with this remark, my wrist jerked and a black blotch formed and caked above my left eyelid. I thought of my doctor, my cousin Hatori Sohma, and how I had blinded his eye in a rage. Was this cruelty so different or any less hurtful?

"Go away, Ren," I mumbled. My heart raced and my cheeks grew hot in fear and alarm. I was, in truth, afraid that she might be armed and intend to hurt the baby. I turned my swelling abdomen away from her so that any efforts might be obstructed. I put down the mascara and shielded my stomach with my hands. "You are not welcome. Leave."

She laughed. I hate how hollow her laugh is. It is forced, stale, high pitched. A sullen gull's cry. "You are transparent," she said. "I am not so stupid as to try to make you miscarry that worthless spawn when Hatori and my Shigure are in the other room and could easily link the blame to me—"

"YOUR Shigure! He was never yours!" I immediately berated myself for rising to the bait, for exploding. She always wants that. Just because she slept with him when he and I were teenagers. Ancient history. But she knows how it can still sting.

She touched my neck. I felt the goosebumps rising. Her hands are so cold, always so icy cold. I felt her nails digging in. I would be bruised there for days. But I didn't dare move. "You broke our bet. You allied yourself with the outsider, that Honda bitch that fancies the monster Kyo. You are no god, nothing special, nothing that deserves second chances. You know it, so you befriended her to keep her from being a threat."

"You're so stupid that it pains me." My voice was distant to me. She was already winning. I hate losing to her.

"AM I?" She laughed again. She drilled in the poison. I hate being her victim. I hate being a victim at all. I hate it. "You little harlot, little sick slut who would murder her own mother given the chance. Unnatural little monster, like the cat, it is no wonder you and he have become friends since you broke the Bond. The only one who ever loved you is dead. Your father is dead. You stole his love from me, but now that he is dead, I won't let you be loved. I will see you forsaken."

"Shut up, mother. You and your insanity, your…melodrama." Mother, why did I say mother? Was she really?

"Wallow in this façade of love and happiness, my child, my Akito. While it lasts." She was petting my neck. Petting it!

I took measured breaths. The baby was kicking. It made me brave, somehow. Maternal instinct. What Ren never possessed. And she called ME a monster. "Shut up and leave. Your love was the only illusion in this entire equation. "

"…I will leave gladly." Her hand had grown clammy on my skin, and she turned and slunk out, closing the door after herself. I watched her hair whipping around her alabaster shoulders as she vanished. Then I stripped naked and stepped into the shower. She had touched me and I felt ill from it. I stood naked in the stall with the lukewarm water rolling down my sore skin, spilling mascara from my eyes, spilling it like thin black paint.

I rubbed the soap bar along my arms and neck, where she had touched me, and thought on the blackness of my mother. Black, my mother's hair, if you caught it in some lights, it was a sort of plum color, an iridescent blue-violet like oil rising off a puddle of rainwater in a parking lot. Filthy beauty.

My mother has hair like an oil slick. It's not just that it's sleek and black, no, not just that it drips and oozes down her pale, slender swan neck like ink staining snow, like a thin black waterfall on a frosted windowpane, no no no no, reader. It's that it feels that way as well. It feels greasy, it suffocates the pores—it feels as though your skin is the down of a white dove foolishly descended upon an oil-slickened ocean surface.

When I was a little girl—feigning, even then, boyhood, yes, even then, before I had to chop short my hair and bound my growing, aching breasts—when I was only six years old, and she still called me "son" (it was not "daughter," but it would do for a frightened and lonely little girl who wanted her mother's love), I would try to touch her hair. I would imagine that it must feel like silk or velvet, or the satin of child's ribbons or a brand-new kimono.

Even then she was cruel to me, for she knew I only wanted to hold her hair and feel she belonged to and cherished me. She knew I just wanted to clutch her hair and shout, "that is my hair, too, my mother's beautiful raven hair is my own!" parading around, toddling around, with a child's dear and foolish pride. So, in her cruelty, my mother Ren Sohma would rob me both of my security and my childish happiness, wearing her hair down so that it was just barely too short for my reach. She would swoosh it around while she slipped among guests at Sohma family banquets. She would wait until my hands were within inches of the very bottom tendrils—then whip it away, supposedly being coy with one of my father's many male successors, supposedly thrusting back her head to laugh—robbing me of my simple desire to touch some part of her.

But one day I succeeded. One day when I was six, and she was on the telephone with my doctor and cousin Hatori, who was, then, barely a teenager. She was berating him for what she perversely saw as falling behind in his medical studies. Her hair drizzled down her back like a plait made of midnight.

I reached out and grabbed it. Hard. And I pulled—yanked. At first I had only meant to just stand there and cradle it and smile, and call it mine. But once I had reached it, and realized how many times she had denied it me, I became so very gorged with my own rage.

I regurgitated, I burst, by pulling and pulling and pulling on that plait, as hard as I could. I was disappointed and furious—my mother's beautiful jet black hair was so slippery and greasy, it was not a mother's soft and gentle hair, but a revolting oil slick. An oil slick! I don't think she ever washed it, I don't think she even does now. Such deceptively beautiful garbage. I wish that my hair were a different color, rather than this deep-bluish-black of Ren's. I will never ever let it grow long. Never ever.

My pulling became fierce jerking, and I started to cry, quietly for some reason, as though I didn't mind my rage being obvious but was ashamed of my grief. I have always been that way, and only recently have learned to allow others to see the sorrow and fear behind my anger, so that they might understand and comfort rather than be afraid of me, a mere frightened girl. But not then. Not when I was a child of six years.

My mother snarled, and the phone crashed against its wall-mount receiver. A crushing blow—I felt dazzling pain in my temple and even after the milky white blur of nerves and blue dots cleared from my vision, I could not see out of my right eye, because my mother had taken a nearby china salad bowl and crashed it, lettuce, dressing, and china, into my forehead, and cracked it open.

It is strange how well I take pain—perhaps because my entire life has consisted of curse twinges, cramps, aches, and morphine—but in any case at the time I merely stood there watching blood, vinaigrette dressing, and baby spinach leaves drip from my head onto linoleum, and let go of my mother's hair, so that she was enabled to simply walk calmly out of the room. I am told that ten minutes passed before she casually mentioned my condition to another maid, who dashed hysterically into the kitchen and found me, and called Hatori.

But anyway. That is why I say my mother's hair is an oil slick. Suffocating. Unbending. Cold. Deadly. Ren herself is an oil slick.

I have been so joyful—though my face is not a candid one, and so my joy comes in whispered smiles and a faint glow in the eyes, rather than raucous laughter—to be reminded that Ren's word is not uncontested, by my family, who have embraced and cried with me, and by caring and compassionate interlopers such as Tohru-Chan…that is to say, Miss Tohru Honda…who could almost be credited with single-handedly catalyzing the end of the Zodiac Curse with which my family and I have so long suffered. It is my turn to comfort. I only fear as to how I shall orchestrate and systematize this compassion, and if that comforting will be too little, too late.

For I have done much evil to the people who have struggled to love me. I have been such a capricious child and spiteful, tyrannical fool. I have done hateful and hurtful things, so certain that I myself would be hated, giving people quick reasons to push me away and despise me, instead of lying in agonizing wait for them to realize my worthlessness and light off of me like crows from the thin branches of a barren tree. But no more.

No more. I have been told that I have worth. I have been unconditionally loved, and firmly pushed. I have been given the tools that will enable me to save myself.

For my first chance came this evening, when I got out of the shower. Right after my mother accosted me. In the form of my smallest and youngest cousin, Kisa Sohma, the Tiger.

Kisa…Kisa is precious to me now. I want so badly to protect her. I want her to trust me. I don't want to do it the way I did it to Yuki though—Yuki who still fears emotional intimacy with anyone because of my stupid, vitriolic meddling. I will not harm anyone else that way again. Yuki I will atone to, somehow, but first I must do right by my little cousin Kisa, who also suffers from sickly self-esteem because of her previous ostracizing from classmates—because of the Curse that is now lifted. I must show Kisa that she need not be afraid of anything when her cousin Akito will look after and guide her. Dear, sweet, selfless little Kisa-Chan, so much like an elementary-school-aged Tohru.

I stepped out of the shower with my mascara still streaked in black down my cheeks, with that damned oil slick hair of my mother's plastered to my face, dripping shower water and draping myself in a comfortingly warm towel. I tied it like a robe. Careful of my swelling middle, I slowly paced to the mirror and stared at a reflection that I found, at the moment, pathetic. I allowed myself a self-pitying scoff, a sort of snorting chuckle.

"How attractive, Aki," I crooned at myself, half-mimicking my mother, arching an eyebrow, placing my hands on my hips, and jutting out my irritatingly large pregnant stomach. The stupid thing. It makes physical grace and charm impossible.

I have recently learned the immeasurable value of having a sense of humor in all situations.

I heard a giggle, and felt a tiny tug, almost as small as a kick from my unborn child—a girl, like Kisa. Like me. A girl.

I jumped and looked down to my right, and there Kisa herself stood, leaning hesitantly against my side and bashfully smiling. Her hands a bit shaky, she wrapped her arms around one of mine. "Hi, Akito-San," she squeaked.

Thus my chance arrived.

You must understand, I am barely five feet and four inches tall. Before I became pregnant, I had to eat and nourish my way, with Hatori's help, above the 100-pound weight mark. And yet, I could pick Kisa up with one arm and throw her any distance. She is truly what my Gure-Ko would quip, in his "romantic" and silly spats of French, as "petite." But what she has allowed me to do, with her willingness to forgive tonight, is enormous. What will follow, I pray, is some sort of chain reaction of epiphany, some way I can find myself helping and counseling and nurturing every single formerly cursed Sohma that ever came under a harsh word by my tongue or a blow by my hand.

If you are willing to listen, I will share my redemption with you.