There Was, Definitely

Sinking into memory, Yuki retraces the years he spent under Akito's control. Like every Zodiac child, he wept the moment they were introduced. Akito insisted the Rat held a place no other member could claim, since the Rat reached the banquet ahead of the rest, which supposedly bound the two of them uniquely close to god.

What followed was far crueler than closeness. Akito's moods swung violently, often soothed by Shigure, until one day he smeared black paint across the walls and declared his whole world a void, wishing to coat Yuki in the same darkness so nothing would stand apart. He then reversed himself, branding Yuki a plaything and claiming the boy's own mother had discarded him.

Isolated at a separate school from his cousins, Yuki finally found classmates who liked him, only to transform after a girl embraced him. He pleaded with Hatori to spare their memories, yet lost those friendships anyway. Watching Kazuma hug Kyo left him aching with envy, and Akito kept feeding him poison: that Kyo's mother had died because of Kyo, that Kyo swore at the funeral to end Yuki's life, that even Hatsuharu loathed him.

Something inside Yuki finally snapped and he bolted, running without direction until he stumbled onto Kyoko Honda shrieking at officers about her vanished daughter. Nearby he discovered the small, lost Tohru and understood she had to reach home. For once he sensed that another person truly required his help, and delivering her back to her mother left him so drained he changed into a rat. In the present, seated with Kakeru, Yuki admits the recent closet incident dragged those memories loose, and he credits Tohru with becoming, in effect, the mother figure who accepted him fully.

The installment draws its title from a line Yuki speaks, and it answers the prior episode's teased mystery by confirming that what he longed for in Tohru was a mother. The adaptation trims several passages, dropping Yuki's opening narration about life beneath Akito, shortening the servants' talk about his illness, and swapping the manga's recurring spider web imagery for falling leaves. A fresh shot of Yuki spotting the cap Tohru kept was created specifically for the screen. It draws from chapters 84 and 85.