Hatsuharu Sohma

Haru is a tall, slim, good-looking teenager whose most distinctive feature is his shaggy hair, snowy white with dark roots and spikes jutting out in every direction. His dark brown eyes are sharp but faintly droopy. He wears the Kaibara High uniform in his own way, left open and without the necktie other students knot on.

He layers on plenty of hardware besides: spiked chokers, small hoops and studs, a green tattoo along his right arm, and three piercings in each ear. Away from school, and partly under Rin's influence, he favors punk clothing in mostly black, all tight jeans, tank tops, and chains.

Two selves live inside Haru, which the family labels white and black. In his ordinary white state he is mellow, kind, and quiet, meeting the world with a flat, unbothered expression and a respectful streak. Provoke him, though, and he flips to black: loud, crude, short-fused, and cruel, capable of turning violent when something serious rattles him, as when Rin left him. He is also prone to bottling his feelings and putting everyone else first until the pressure breaks him.

Whichever mode he is in, Haru acts as an older-brother figure to the younger cursed Sohmas and stays fiercely loyal to those he loves, chief among them Yuki, Rin, Kisa, Hiro, and to a degree Tohru. Despite being younger than Yuki or Kyo, he shows unusual maturity and a sharp eye, and he enjoys the occasional well-meaning prank, once whispering to Tohru so she would call Yuki by his given name and delight him. A quirk of the curse leaves him with a hopeless sense of direction, apt to get lost even on short, familiar routes. It is eventually revealed that his black persona formed as a shield against the years of insults he absorbed as a child.

From a young age the Sohma adults mocked Haru as stupid, drawing on the old tale of how the clever Rat rode the gullible Ox to claim first place among the zodiac. The taunts made him quietly resent Yuki, the Rat, and stew in constant irritation until his black side emerged, distressing his parents enough that they enrolled him in martial arts to burn off the stress. He took to it and befriended Kyo there, but the ridicule followed him even into the dojo.

Everything shifted the day he finally confronted Yuki and dumped every bottled grievance on him, blaming the Rat for all his misery. When Yuki simply asked whether Haru truly believed he was stupid, Haru saw the trap his own mind had built and understood he was nothing of the sort. Yuki's quiet faith in him drained away most of his anger, and the encounter left him so struck by how unlike his assumptions Yuki really was that he fell in love with him. Some years on, Haru and Rin became a couple; when Akito discovered the relationship, Rin shielded him by claiming she had seduced him, and was thrown from a second-floor window for it. Sickened by how much Yuki suffered inside the main house, Haru also pressed Shigure to let Yuki move in with him.

His curse comes undone during the third-year arc while he is with Rin, and rather than pure joy he finds the moment bittersweet, the two comforting each other in its wake. At the final banquet he tells Yuki he will always love him, sparking a flash of jealousy in Rin that he soon soothes. By the epilogue he is reminiscing with Rin and Momiji about how the curse resolved, and in Fruits Basket Another he and Rin are married with twin children, Sora and Riku.