Ayame Sohma

Ayame is a striking, tall, and slender man with long, straight silver-grey hair and gold eyes, the latter shaded yellowish-green in the 2001 anime. He dresses in showy outfits, many of them his own designs that he models before selling, and his everyday wear carries a Chinese flavor much like Yuki's. His cursed form is a long, slim white snake, and after the curse lifts he takes to wearing shoes made of snakeskin.

Theatrical and brimming with confidence, Ayame paints himself in far grander terms than anyone else would, though the bravado masks a simple wish to close the distance with his younger brother. He and Yuki do share one pastime, needling Kyo with nicknames crafted purely to irritate. His childhood neglect of Yuki left a rift he spends years trying to mend, and Yuki, for his part, admits he does not dislike Ayame so much as find him exhausting in large doses.

With Shigure he plays up a comic double act, the two striking triumphant poses that leave Hatori and the others exasperated, and he carries a distinctly perverted streak besides.

In their youth, Ayame and the other eldest cursed Sohmas dreamed of their god's coming birth and gathered around the pregnant Ren. His deepest regret dates to the same period: when a frightened Yuki clutched his sleeve begging to be saved from Akito, Ayame brushed him aside and walked off. He attended high school alongside Shigure and Hatori, the three forming the Mabudachi Trio, and served as Student Council President, coldly ignoring a classmate's affections in a way he later came to rue. As an adult he opens a boutique bearing his own name, selling made-to-order dresses and maid outfits with his seamstress and love, Mine Kuramae, and in the final stretch he hunts down an apartment for Yuki heading off to college.

As the Snake, Ayame is at the mercy of temperature, transforming whenever the air turns too hot or too cold, so he shelters under an umbrella outdoors and needs warmth to change back, and he falls ill easily as a result. Snakes are said to hold deep, complex hearts that love completely, a fit for Ayame, whose curse was the fifth of the Zodiac to break; the moment it did, he pulled Mine into an embrace, overjoyed to finally hold the woman he loved. He and Mine later marry and raise a daughter, Hibika, and a son, Chizuru.