(This is my first story, so please be nice! Actually, this will be about the first thing that I submit, so...I don't mind constructive criticism, but please don't point out every single possible problem and not really say how I could possibly change it.

Also, the majority of the story is intended to be more light-hearted than this, but I'm trying to keep it like the main character sees it, and before the main story, she really did see it something like this.

Enjoy!)






Haruka Sohma almost still remembered. Barely. In the back of her mind, mistaken for a realistic dream from when she was about five years old, she remembered her orange-haired sister. She remembered the monster that her mother rejected, the monster that seemed almost to divide the family between the parents and the children. She remembered her sister, but only as a dream.

More than the dream, she remembered waking up in her house, with her parents smiling strangely, as though nothing bad had happened at all. Haruka couldn't quite accept that; the dream seemed far too realistic to be anything but reality. She confessed her dream to her parents, partially out of hope brought on the myth that telling people about your dreams keeps them from coming true. She couldn't allow herself to think that her parents were so cruel that when they had a daughter who sometimes turned into a cat, they practically threw her onto the streets.

Her parents listened, looked at Haruka strangely, and dismissed the dream as just that - a dream. Nothing more. Not even a possibility. They said that if they did have a daughter like that, they'd hold her closely and give her all the care and possitive attention that she needed.

Haruka didn't think she believed them, because the dream was just too real. It couldn't possibly have been inspired by absolutely nothing.

A few months later, Haruka fell ill. Her parents took her to the doctor - a doctor in the Sohma family, who only worked for the Sohma family, named Hatori. Having been as young as she was, she was almost scared of him at first, but when he helped her recover from being sick, she knew that he wasn't so bad.

The strangest thing about Hatori was that when she saw him, Haruka immediately thought of the dream about her sister. No person even vaguely like him ever appeared in her memories of the dream, but, oddly enough, whenever she saw him, all that she could think about was the dream and the mysteries behind it.

Haruka, as a small child, truly believed that there was something strange about her family. Hatori made her think of a dream about a sister, and, though she forgot about the incident within a few years, she did remember seeing a girl who strangely resembled the sister from her dream in Hatori's house.

As soon as the girl saw Haruka looking at her, her eyes widened with fear for the split second between when Haruka saw her and when she ducked away and then made a certain amount of noise running away.

Haruka never really thought about the girl after that. A few times, a wistful idea came into her head that the girl was the sister that Haruka had dreamed about, and that the girl was going to join the family, but soon enough, Haruka forgot completely about the girl. She always remembered the dream, but never the girl. Even when Hatori told her, years later, that she could find a good friend in an orange-haired Sohma girl, Haruka thought only of the dream, and not of the girl, and when she met the very same girl, she thought only of Hatori's words and the dream.














(It gets less depressing and strange later, I promise! It's a Fruits Basket fanfic, and what's Fruits Basket without the angst? And really, it'll end up being a fairly happy story, but the whole thing is triggered by angsty pasts, so...it might sound a little depressing for a little while, but it really will be more cheerful later! I swear it will! Just be a little patient!)