Not Her
Disclaimer: I do not hold any legal rights to Hirano's work, nor his characters. This story is purely for entertainment and is without any momentary gains. My original character is the only thing aside from the plot that I can claim as my own and is not to be used by others without my explicit permission. Thank you.
She stood in the door way without her usual exuberance. In fact, if he were to pinpoint her look just now out of the corner of his eye that she was wearing quite the thoughtful expression. It looked almost as if she was decided exactly how to word her thoughts; something he felt she didn't take as much time as she should on a normal basis.
He continued to busy himself with his work patiently waiting for her to voice her reasons for being here.
It felt like another ten minutes of her just standing there before she finally spoke.
"I'm not her, you know."
"Hmm? Not who?"
"Her. The woman you see when you look at me."
He set the Philips screw driver he was using down and turned to her fully, "I'm afraid I don't quite understand. Who is it that you're referring to and of course I see you when I look at you; I am seeing you right now."
She looked away for a moment to deliver a disbelieving laugh, "Don't play around with me, Walter. You don't see me, you've never saw me; all you've seen from the beginning is who you want me to be but I'm not her." She enunciated the last four words as if they were each their own individual sentence.
He turned on his foot to look to the side for a moment with a mixed bag of emotions ranging from guilt of having the truth known and to annoyance that she was putting it up to his face demanding answers.
"Look at me, not through me, at me." Her demand was a gentle one but that didn't mean his compliance wasn't without its grievances. "Who is she? Who is it that you see when you look at me?"
He moved to turn away again when her pleading tones caught him once more, "Tell me...please, who is she?"
He took an unnecessary breath to steady himself against the flood gates as they open, "Someone who was very dear to me, to all of us...well, except the Captain; he didn't really know her, not like I did." He drifted off in his musings of times gone by.
She let him drift in memories for a few minutes before softly saying something he already knew though probably needed to hear none the less, "I can't be her, you know, no matter how much you wish I were."
He finally let out that sigh he had been holding back but not out of aggravation, "I know...I know."
A/N: One day I decided I was going to challenge myself by picking a picture and creating a story from it. This story is the fruit of that labor and it also became a side scene from a much larger on-going story that will probably never get posted here.