Snow In a Fruits Basket (Fruits Basket)

Chapter One: Of White and Red Stuff

Disclaimer: This story is set several months after the previous story, In Order To Remember. In writing this, I tried to dovetail from the more anime oriented story to a more manga oriented story. Hopefully they have blended together well. This story begins where my last left off.

Fruits Basket belongs to its creator. I only used the characters to create a story that could have happened in the manga.

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Chapter One : of White and Red stuff.

The sun shone brightly, reflected upwards by the fine layer of snow on the ground. Despite the thin covering of ice crystals, the slight breeze wasn't freezing, just cold. Inside the two-story house, it was quiet. No one had to go to school. No one had to be up for work. There was just the silence filled with the occasional crick of an insect humming to itself.

Suddenly, a loud yowl filled the house. "What the...!" Kyo Sohma looked out the front door in horror as the white stuff reflected the sun back into his copper/brown eyes. He slammed the sliding door shut and headed for the kitchen, his fists clenched, back hunched.

A very sleepy Tohru Honda left her room, rubbing her eyes. "Kyo? What's wrong?" She half stumbled down the stairs on her way to find the reason for Kyo's outburst, shivering a bit as a blast of wind slid through the crack of the not quite closed door. She closed it all the way and went in search of Kyo, not bothering to look outside, so great was her worry.

"Kyo," Shigure Sohma's voice came from the back of the house, "please try not to destroy the house!" But just to make sure his request wasn't being ignored, he ventured out into the open area between the living room and the kitchen. He was halfway into the dining room when Yuki Sohma groggily walked down the stairs and stumbled into him.

"What's going on," Yuki asked in a sleep-coated voice. But his question was answered by the sound of Kyo letting out another howl of outrage. "Oh." And he automatically turned around and headed back upstairs. "I'm going back to bed. Wake me when something important happens," he said.

Inside the kitchen, Tohru knelt to clean up the pieces of a broken bowl, the bowl Kyo had just dropped. He'd dropped it because he hadn't seen her until he'd run into her.

"I'm so sorry," Tohru apologized as she wiped up spilled milk and cereal, ignoring the milk on her own shirt that had spread in a lovely wet splotch.

Kyo stared at her for a moment before his senses came back to him. He'd been ranting and raving until he realized that Tohru was, once again, cleaning up after him. "You don't have to do that," he said in an almost accusatory voice. "I'm the one who broke the stupid bowl."

Tohru kept wiping up the spill, trying to avoid the glass shards. "It's not a problem," she said in response. "I feel partially responsible. If only I'd been watching where I was going I wouldn't have run into you like that, and you wouldn't have dropped the bowl. So, really, it's my fault."

"Really, you don't have to do that," Kyo tried again and knelt down to help her. "You might cut yourself or something." And as quickly as his anger had flared, it seemed to be gone as he helped Tohru mop up the spilled milk, gathering the broken pieces together. "Damn!" He quickly pulled his hand up to his mouth and sucked on his index finger.

"Kyo, did you cut yourself," Tohru asked, all of her worry transferred to Kyo's injured finger in an instant. "Let me see," she added, leaning forward to look at his cut.

"It's nothing," Kyo insisted as Shigure entered the kitchen to see the cause of the commotion. "I can take care of it. Don't worry about it."

"Let me see," Tohru insisted, pulling at his hand. "Kyo, you're bleeding." Some blood oozed out around his finger as he tried to pull it out of Tohru's reach. It wasn't that he minded, just that it really was insignificant, at least to his thinking. The cut wasn't even very deep.