-- @Romance.com --
01: Morning
Wednesday April 21, 2004
Capheine says: New fic! Yosh! This was stewing in my brain for a while until it exploded into an entirely new plot and hit me like a cold day in June. This'll be my most dramatic story yet, and I hope you enjoy.
Be ready for slight fluff (no lemon). I've also dropped the use of honorifics and random Japanese words because I found that they're difficult to juggle and usually turn out incorrect. Regardless, enjoy!
Disclaimers dictate: Fruits Basket ain't mine.
-=+=-
The ring of the phone woke Tohru from her guilty sleep. Her desk lamp nearly blinded her and she snatched the receiver off the hook. "Hello?" she mumbled groggily.
There was no answer. Only random beeps and clicks pounded into her tired ears.
Faxes, ugh.
She gently lay the phone down and had to concentrate before she could correctly place it back. Faint light seeped through uneven window blinds letting Tohru blankly stare at the thick textbooks and journals spread around her. It took her a moment to register that she should have been working on the paper that was due for class in two days. She had only taken a quick nap, besides she should be getting back to bed it was only…
8:12?!
She grabbed her digital clock and shook it for all it was technologically worth before setting it back down again. Tohru groaned weakly and struggled to sit up properly. Her computer screen blipped back on from hibernation, and the half-completed paper glared back at her in 256 colours.
College and work. Work and college. A merry-go-round of chaos that spun her round and round until she was nauseous from the labour.
Was there any escape? She was too tired to consider any.
It was time to get back on the hamster wheel. Her fingers clacked uselessly against the keyboard. Words weren't coming out of her fingers. They could barely come out of her mouth. Advanced biology? What the hell was biology?!
She brought two hands to her forehead, "Concentrate Tohru, come on. You can do this."
Again, she tried stringing coherent words together, but found her mind wandering again. Soon she was leaned back on her chair, wondering if Ronald McDonald had a day job.
She knew she should have been concentrating. But reality was such an ugly place to focus her attention. She was falling behind in school; new concepts and facts flying past her head. Her workplace was filled with vicious hyenas who would sacrifice anyone for a cheap laugh. Her mother was sick and possibly dying. She had lost herself in this crappy thing she called a life.
"Smile!" proclaimed an oh-so cuddly kitten poster taped up above her computer monitor. Tohru's cheek muscles hurt. She didn't want to smile, but using her fingers pulled the ends of her mouth up into a sardonic grin. Did the kitten really think that one simple phrase would work? The kitten didn't have homework to worry about. The kitten didn't need to think about grocery lists or unfinished chores. No, it lived in it's own little cuddly, welcoming 2-D world.
"Oh stop being so pessimistic already!" her inner voice told her. "It's just a poster!"
Tohru actually felt guilty.
The poster had been given to her by a childhood friend and suddenly she had the urge to look through her elementary yearbooks. A temporary escape from all the worries of the grown-up world.
"Stupid stupid stupid! You should be working! Remember? The paper?!" the adult Tohru inside her head reminded her.
An innocent glance was all it would be. Nothing more than a peek at the past, she argued back.
She shuffled her way to the bookshelf and pulled out a particularly fat yearbook. It was fairly dusty, and Tohru reminded herself of the chores that needed to be completed after the paper.
There's so much work to…
Again, she had to pinch herself to make her remain optimistic. After all, optimism was basically the only reason why she continued her life this way. Things would get better eventually. Eventually.
She split the pages of the fat book open and watched the pictures flip by, feeling wave upon wave of memories. It was comforting and saddening at the same time. Knowing that there was something in the past that was better than all this, and wanting so badly to sink into it once again.
Tohru simply sighed.
Watching the photos flick past, she saw her little self smiling. Sweet, innocent, childish happiness. And gradually, the same smile pasted itself onto her present face. Things would get better. She trusted herself enough to guarantee that.
The paused at one picture and noticed a little boy sitting behind her. He had turned away from the camera with bashfulness and all she could see was the back of his baseball cap. Flipping to another picture, Tohru noticed the same boy with her again. They were running a race, and the boy was obviously faster than her struggling self; but he had linked hands with her, and was pulling her along, urging her to keep up with the pace of the race.
She flipped from one picture to the next, and in nearly all of them, she was with that same baseball cap-wearing boy.
Kyou.
It was odd how the name came so easily to her.
She wanted that past back. She adored the idea of recess and monkey bars. She wished to hear the jingle of the ice cream truck and feel the dusty sidewalk chalk again. She wanted to be back in the past, being dragged along by a boy she once called a friend.
Kyou.
"I have his e-mail address," she whispered, still absorbed with the paper memories she held in her hands.
She paused.
It was odd how she had suddenly remembered this fact.
It was odd how an elementary yearbook could make her heart beat so fast. It was only a handful of memories, but somehow she felt she could sustain herself upon them. They would let her escape from this excuse for a life and show her that maybe time travel was possible. She wanted to leave everything behind and start all over again.
She rummaged around her bookshelf and finally located a slender grade school diary. Tohru hoped her old self had been smart enough to keep his precious e-mail address buried between the pages. Entry after entry, searching for something that would assure her that this life wasn't a total loss.
And finally, a small slip of paper tucked in between entries marked June 27 and July 8. The endearing schoolboy writing made her heart melt and freeze at the same time.
Probability smashed her head on like a cartoon anvil. In this technologically advancing age, what were the chances that he had maintained the same e-mail account? Nearly ten years was a pretty long time to keep an e-mail address.
Kyou.
The name sent shivers down to the tips of her fingers. Logic didn't matter to her. Besides, she hated math, probability was something she didn't want to consider. She just wished to dive into the past again.
Jiggling the mouse frantically, Tohru woke her monitor from dreary blackness. She logged on to her instant messenger as quickly as possible, and cursed her slow Internet. To her, every second wasted meant another second that Kyou was slipping past her fingers.
It was an illogical thought, but reality didn't matter. All that mattered was bringing back her past.
She added him to her contacts list. Amazingly, he was suddenly online.
It had worked.
It had worked?
It couldn't be that easy. Maybe she had made a mistake, maybe…
[ Onigiri Pride ] says:
Hi
[ Onigiri Pride ] says:
It's Tohru.
-=+=-
Capheine says: Yus yus, I realize it actually is quite boring right now, but believe me, it'll get better. (Or at least in my opinion it gets better). Anywho, I appreciate comments as well as criticism. Feel free to flame, as long as it's justified. Thanks for reading!
Oh, and this is an AU (alternate universe) fic. So the curse does not apply.
Wednesday April 21, 2004