Word Count : 2133
Tohru, Yuki and I had gone out to do the groceries since we were low on food. It had started raining and none of us were wearing rain jackets or had umbrellas. We were now standing under a roof outside waiting for the rain to stop.
"The rain should stop soon. Let's wait a little longer." Yuki says, looking at the sky.
"Okay."
"Say it's almost time for the final exam." He mentions. Tohru frowns, she was always worried when it came to exams.
"It'll be fine, Tohru." I told her. She smiles
"We have student council elections before that, though." She points out.
"Yeah" Yuki sighs.
"Did the president come talk to Yuki about that?" I remember, earlier during the week the president had started demanding Yuki to be the new president.
"Mmh, President Takei-san insists that Yuki be his successor, but I suppose it's not something you want to do, is it?" Tohru wonders.
"You're right. I don't know what he and the others expect of me, but they got the wrong idea about me. It bothers me. The real me is more..." He trails off.
"More what?"
"Nothing, nevermind." He smiles.
"Okay! The rain seems to be tapering off." Tohru says.
"Is that Haru?" I ask, pointing across the street to a person.
"Ah, it's Yuki." Haru says. He wasn't wearing his jacket and had it bundled in his arms. He was drenched from the rain.
"Haru!"
"Hatsuharu-san!"
"What are you doing out in the rain?" Haru asks us.
"What are you doing? You soaked. Are you lost again?" Yuki questions. Tohru pulls out her handkerchief and starts drying his face.
"Looking for something. I was looking for this one." he explains. He pulls back his jacket in his arms revealing a tiger.
"What a cute cat!" Tohru excalims.
"That's a tiger, right? I'm not picturing it." I ask.
"Honda-san, that's a tiger." Yuki tells her.
"Huh."
"Kisa Sohma, a tiger. Her bites hurt." Haru adds.
"S-so she must be the tiger zodiac " Tohru gasps, "Nice to meet you, I'm Tohru Honda." She greets. Tohru reaches out to pet Kisa.
"Tohru maybe don-" I tried to tell her but it was too late. Kisa bit her hand. Tohru lets out a small gasp of pain and proceeds to pass out.
"Honda-san!"
---
When we arrived at the house the sun had already come out. We were sitting in the main room with the doors open letting the sun come in and warm the room. I was sitting next to Tohru bandaging her hand. Kisa was sitting in the corner of the room facing the wall with her back to us.
"Oh no, you got bitten." Shigure says, looking at me, banding her hand.
"Y-yes. I-I-It surprised me." Tohru stutters.
"Kisa, come here and apologize." Yuki orders.
"U-um, I'm fine, really." Tohru tells him
"Kisa!"
"Yuki-kun, satchan doesn't talk." Shigure says
"huh?"
"She can't talk. She stopped talking altogether after entering middle school. According to Tori-nii, it's a psychological issue. It made her lock away her words. Things happened that made her stop talking and going to school. Then today, she ran away from home." Haru explains.
"What?!"
"That's why I was looking for her. I was surprised to find her as a tiger." He adds.
"Did she bump into someone of the opposite gender?"
"It seemed like she was just exhausted." He answers.
"That's good. It would have been a mess to try and find them." I say.
"So, what actually happened to cause this?" Yuki asks.
"You know."
"What? "
"Bullying." Haru answered. The next thing we knew, Kisa was on the table biting Haru's arm. Tohru screams. "That hurts. What, are you mad? Telling me not to shoot my mouth off? Yeah, right. You know how worried I've been. Your parents are looking all over for you right now." Haru tells her, she lets go of him and runs outside.
"W-What should we do?! Oh you're bleeding, Hatsuharu-san!" Tohru panics.
"We need to stop kisa-san's bleeding!" Shigure says.
"I'll go stop Kisa-san bleeding!" Tohru says, still panicking and runs off after Kisa.
"Calm down." Shigure mumbles to Tohru but she was already outside.
"You're too calm, sensei." Haru tells him
"Haa-kun, did you quietly turn dark?" Shigure asks.
"Uh uh, just grumpy from the pain."
"Haru come here, I'll bandage it." I tell him, motioning him to come closer.
"Do you know what to do with Kisa?" Shigure asks as I was bandaging his upper arm.
"You seem pretty worried. I didn't know you were close." Yuki mentions. Haru and Shigure look at each other and back at Yuki.
"Jealous?" they say simultaneously.
"No!" Yuki yells slamming his hands on the table.
"He's no fun."
"Nope."
"I just feel like I need to help her because she reminds me of you when you stopped talking for a while." Haru tells him.
"Haru, maybe you don't want to bring this up." I suggest.
"You curled up in a corner and went silent. That was the only way you could protect yourself. She's doing the same." Haru continues.
"Shut up!" Yuki shouts.
"Do you have to get so worked up?"
"Yes, I do!"
"Are you ashamed?" Shigure asks. That made Yuki hit the limits and he walked out of the room in the direction Kisa and Tohru went. At that time I had finished bandaging Haru's arm.
"You always like to rub salt into the wound. It's a bad habit of yours." Haru tells him.
"Shigure..." I pause. "That was pushing it too far."
"It's in my nature, I'm afraid." He smiles and I head upstairs.
---
That night we had finished eating and Tohru was doing the dishes with the help of Kisa. Tohru had gotten Kisa to warm up a bit and now she follows Tohru everywhere.
"Stay here? Kisa will?" Kyo asks.
"Something happened today and I decided to take her in for a while." Shigure explains.
"What things?" he asks.
"Probably can't hurt. It looked like her mom was nearing her limits, too. Might as well give them time apart to heal."
"I have no idea what's going on. So where's Kisa?" Kyo asks, having been absent for the whole ordeal.
"Kisa is sticking with Tohru. She won't leave her side." I motion to the two of them.
"Huh?"
---
It had been three days since Kisa had started staying with us.
"Doesn't she find that annoying?" Kyo asks, looking at Kisa following Tohru everywhere. Tohru starts hugging Kisa.
"I love you!"
"I don't think she minds all that much." I say.
"She looks happy about it."
"I don't really get it. Hey, I'm hungry." Kyo says.
"Okay. Hey, Tohru, Kisa, what do you guys want to eat tonight?" I asked, but there were no answers.
"Kisa, you can't even say what you want to eat?" Kyo says. Shigure puts his arm on Kyo and leans on him.
"Now, now. Ignore everything this idiotic nad weak-willed fool says."
"Hey, get off! Don't touch me! It's creepy." Kyo says waving Shigure off.
"Come one no need to be shy."
Tohru then gasps and rushes around and finds a piece of paper. She grabs a pen and begins to write stuff down. "Ta-da! Ami use this." She says, handing me the paper. I look at it to find a bunch of lines written down in a strange fashion. It took me a moment to realize what she was trying to do.
"Sure."
"Gotcha! You'll leave it to chance." Shigure clues in as well.
"Kisa, point to the one you like." I tell her, showing her the piece of paper. She points at the middle line. "You want that one?" I say. I place it on the table and drag my finger across the lines. I pause once I get to the end "We have a winner! Tonight we'll have..." I unfold the paper and read it out loud for everyone to hear. "Scrambled eggs with chives."
"Someone's getting comfortable here." Kyo complains.
"Oh right! You don't like chives." I gasp.
"Go ahead, make it."
---
Finally we were back at school eating lunch on the roof.
"... but she can't stay at Shii-chan's house forever, right? What will Kisa do?" Momiji asks.
"She's probably thinking that through right now. She seems like the type to overthink things, since she's a naturally serious girl. It's probably how she pushed herself to this point." Haru explains.
"And, there's her mom, too." Yuki mentions. Momiji looks at the ground sadly.
"Momiji-kun, Kisa-san's mom is okay. Yesterday, she called to check up on her." Tohru tells him.
"Does that mean Kisa's mutti is thinking of her? Otherwise she wouldn't have called, right?" Momiji asks.
"Exactly!" Tohru answers and Momiji smiles
"Yeah."
Tohru you really have a gift.
"Still, why was she being bullied?"
"I forget." Haru says, looking away.
"Come one."
"I know. I heard my aunts gossiping about it. Kisa would have never told me. They said it was because of her looks at first. Like her hair, eyes, and that kind of thing. They said it offended the other students." Momiji replies
"It's the fate of those possessed by an animal spirit with unnatural hair colour." Haru says touching and fiddling with his hair.
"I remember that back in elementary school." I say thinking back to elementary.
"People made fun of me a lot." Haru says
"But you just turned Dark and knocked them out." Yuki points out.
"Seriously?!" Tohru gasps.
"I'm better than Kyo. He half-killed them." Haru defends.
"That sounds like him." I sigh.
"Huh?"
"He really was a problem child."
"When I was younger it happened for a small amount of time but there were a few kids that stuck with me and stood up for me when I was too scared to, and it soon stopped. Maybe, one day someone can help her."
"But my aunts said Kisa tried hard, too. She told the others that she couldn't help her hair and eye colour. After that, everybody started ignoring her. And even though they ignored her, they laughed when she'd say something. They'd snicker at her. My... My classmates have never done that to me. So I could only imagine what it was like. I imagine how I'd feel if people snickered every time I said something. That would... that would make me feel sad." Momiji says, both he and Tohru start crying. The bell rings, signalling the end of lunch. Tohru whips her tears and Yuki whips Momiji's.
"Come on class is starting."
"Yuki. I'm going to sensei's house today. I wanna see Kisa. And I have something for her." Haru says.
"Something for her?"
"A letter. From her homeroom teacher. It'll probably make us wanna puke." He says, showing us the letter in his hand. And he walks off Momiji getting up and following him.
"See you!" Momiji waves.
"I don't think being weak is a good thing but I also don't think that stronger necessarily means better. You sometimes hear it's survival of the fittest. But we are humans not animals." Yuki says.
"Yes." Tohru agrees and the two of them smile.
"I feel a little braver."
---
Haru, Yuki and I sat outside while Kisa was reading the letter her teacher sent her. "What does it say?" Haru asks. She puts the letter down and Haru takes it from her.
"Sohma-san, how are you? Will you come back to school soon? The rest of the class is waiting for your return. You can always talk to me, so why not try a little harder to make friends with everybody?" He reads out loud. He stops and hands the letter over to Yuki.
"The most important thing is to learn to love yourself. Find something good about yourself, so you can love yourself. If you hate yourself, how can others love you?" Yuki finishes.
"Yep makes me want to puke." Haru says.
"I-I also had a time where I stopped speaking. For slightly different reasons. But, like you, I felt embarrassed and hated myself. 'Learn to love yourself'? What does that mean? How are we supposed to find something good about ourselves? The whole reason we hate ourselves is because we only see the parts we hate. So forcing us ourselves to find good points feels hollow, like we're making things up." Yuki says dropping the pages. "It's not like that. That's not how it works. I think that it's only when someone says they love you that you're able to love yourself. I think when someone accepts you, that's when you start feeling like you can forgive yourself a little and start to love yourself."
"Yeah..." A small voice says. We all looked at Kisa in shock that she said something. She starts to cry. "It made me happy..."
"Kisa."
"Kisa what do you plan to do? Do you want to stay like this?" Yuki asks. She shakes her head in response.
"No... I can't. I need to try harder. Or... Or else I'll turn into an even worse person. Even if we can't be friends again? Even if they keep ignoring me... I have to make sure to try a little harder, or else!" She says her voice was quiet and she talked slowly, having to get used to using her voice again.
"You're right. Let's try. I'll try too. And if you get sad again or it's too painful, come here again. She'll be here for you. It's been a long time..."
"I finally got to hear your voice again." Haru says, giving her a hug.
---
I decided to tag along with Yuki Kisa as they went to pick up Tohru from her work. I see Tohru walking out of the building.
"Big sis..." Kisa calls out. Tohru looks around wondering where the voice was coming from. Her eyes land on Kisa. "Big sis!" Kisa calls out again, this time louder. Tohru and Kis run to each other, hugging each other and not letting go.
"Kisa-san!" Tohru says and they both cried not tears of sadness but of joy.
---
When I got back to the house, I made my way upstairs to my room. I saw Kyo walking to his room.
"Hey, Kyo." I called out.
"What?" He says turning his attention to me.
"Is it true you almost sent bullies to their death for bullying you?" I ask. I see his ears go red.
"Who told you that!" He yells.
"Haru did."
"I'm going to kill that bastard." He growls.
"Please don't." I laugh,
---
We were waving Kisa goodbye as she made her way to school. After everything that had happened she finally got the courage to head back to school.
"Yuki should've come, too."
"He says he has something to do."