Chapter Text
hu·bris
/ˈ(h)yo͞obrəs/
noun
excessive pride or self-confidence.
(in Greek tragedy) excessive pride toward or defiance of the gods, leading to nemesis
It is one thing to be proud. It is another to be too proud. It is a third thing entirely to hold the physical manifestation of one’s pride in the palm of one’s hand, its silvery fur slicked against its body and its eyes squinted shut, heart beating rapidly against one’s curled fingertips.
Sachiko Sohma had wanted for too much, and now she was paying the price.
When she fell pregnant the first time, she felt all the aches and pains the pregnancy books prepared her for. The mood swings, the cravings, the tender twinges throughout her body. But she felt something else, something more , something she couldn’t qualify with words alone. She chalked it up to simple pregnancy brain and wondered if the other women she saw trawling the estate with their own swollen stomachs felt the same way, if perhaps this was a normal side effect and she needed simply to reference the index of another what to expect guide.
Only later, when a little white snake no thicker than a shoestring twined itself around her fingers, would she realize that her gut instinct was correct.
The doctor who attended to her birth, a serious man with an infant of his own, explained it to her as though he was reading off the side effects of cholesterol medication: a family legacy, an ancient magic, a blessing and its burdens rolled into one.
After that, her hospital bed felt like a conference room table. Briefcases were snapped open and shut while the male nurses bottle-fed her baby, forms drawn up and contracts signed, figures and allowances she’d never bothered to dream of agreed upon through the haze of prescription painkillers.
When the dust settled, she wasn’t sure what had been real and what had been dreamt, but when she dared to hold her white-haired baby to her chest when he cried out in the middle of the night, she knew. And she grieved.
And then she kept moving.
The status was some consolation, Sachiko learned.
With the doctor's wife and the dog's mother, she formed an elite sect of an already elite clan, earning the benevolent approval of the family head for the mere fact that their wombs had been blessed by the spirits of the Zodiac.
(If one Zodiac child was a blessing, two would be a bounty. And did she dare to dream of a third?)
More children were born, inhabited by the other spirits. Rooster, monkey, boar, horse.
Sachiko kept a tally. Organization was always her strong suit; she was perfect and perfunctory. She knew what was left. She knew when to act. She dabbed perfume behind her ears and strategically calibrated the construction of her wardrobe, the ingredients in her dinners, exactly how many of her teeth to show when she smiled.
It didn't take long before the nausea that had trademarked her first pregnancy reared again, but this time the unqualifiable feeling was recognizable as a distinct pull toward the family heir, who unsettled her with his dark eyes unblinking as he smoothed a tiny hand over her stomach.
Good, she thought. It would be a shame for all this effort to go to waste.
Sachiko couldn't help but feel the eyes of the other Zodiac mothers on her every time she walked the grounds of the estate. Certainly they envied her, since she would be the first of them to carry two blessed children. Envy, she told herself. That was the look in their eyes. Nothing more and nothing less.
She did her best to carry herself like a woman worthy of their envy.
The nursery was decorated, the baby toys bought, the older son spoken to about his imminent responsibilities as a big brother. Sachiko wasn't naive enough to think she had more time than she did; every mother thus far had gone into labor early so she had her hospital bag packed months in advance and was pleased to note she had predicted her own due date within three days.
She hadn't cared to learn the gender, and no test or procedure could tell her what she really wanted to know.
It was a boy. She knew it was a boy, because if it wasn’t a boy, she could have held it in her arms without reducing it to a handful of sticky, trembling creature .
Sachiko had miscalculated.
Rat, rabbit, cow, tiger, ram. The last remaining spirits in the cycle of years.
She hadn't considered another.
The doctor’s lips pressed into a thin line when he appraised the child; his bedside manner had soured since Sachiko had given birth the first time, likely in conjunction with the death of his wife.
"The cat is a special case," he said.
She came to find out that special was a word for a lot of things, but it wasn't what she would have chosen to describe the child’s unique situation.
It was months later that another Sohma mother gave birth to a blessed child - properly blessed this time, not burdened, a tiny golden rat with a tuft of orange hair.
The household celebrated and Sachiko sat by and damned her own ambition. Two Zodiac children would have made her the darling of the clan, but the cat wasn’t even considered a proper member of their inner circle. She would have been better off with an average child, a spiritless son to study law or medicine and take care of her in her old age.
All risk, no reward. A dismal return on investment.
Her fall from grace was just the tip of the iceberg. A special case.
Sachiko found out just how special his case was when the head of the family had pointed at the boy tugging on blades of grass in the garden and sneered that someday, he’d be locked in a cage.
She learned later, too, that his special case included one more transformation than she’d accounted for; not into a cat, as he had at birth, but into something dark, something grotesque. Something inhuman.
The doctor prescribed no pills or tinctures, but rather a rough-hewn set of beads, deep red and off-white stark against the child’s pale wrist.
“Don’t take them off,” she warned.
He didn’t respond. He never did. But he clamped a free hand over the rosary and kept it there most of the time, like clinging to a security blanket.
Though he had never really clung to a security blanket. His peculiarity on top of his curse made him all the more unbearable to be around.
So Sachiko did her best not to be around him. She left him in the care of maids and babysitters while she occupied her mind with operas and ballets and filled her closets with the latest out of Paris and Milan. And when she did catch a wayward glimpse of the silver-haired child, she reminded herself that it was only a matter of time before he wouldn’t be her problem at all.
As far as she was concerned, Sachiko Sohma had only one son. And as far as he was concerned, Yuki Sohma had no mother.