Title: The distance between us
Author: Me. Ryo-chan or whatever you like me to call. Ha.
Series: Mai HiME
Pairing: Shizuru x Natsuki
Disclaimer: Yes, unfortunately I do not own Mai HiME and its characters
Warning: This fanfic contains lesbian interaction.
Dedication: This fanfic is dedicated to my dear friend JuuhachiGo and all ShizNat fan girls.
Description: Just read the title. It speaks for itself.
ShizNat angst. Set after the events of the Mai HiME series.
Author's notes:
Hi there! n.n
This is my first fanfic about Mai HiME/ShizNat.
Correction of the numerous spelling and grammar mistakes I certainly made and feedback/constructive criticism are welcome.
As you will see the story is from Natsuki's point of view and presents her thoughts, feelings and impressions. It turned out kind of depressing at the beginning, but I promise it will become more positive later on.
Fortunately, NSKruger did find some time to beta read it (yay, THANK YOU VERY MUCH:3); thanks to her you won't have to read a story massacred by my stupid grammar mistakes.
I hope you enjoy it!
Prologue: Reminiscence
'Why do we have to do this today? I mean, compared to "unhealthy" mayo ice cream, hot tea in this heat is lethal…Mataku…I should stop giving in every time.'
The weather was hot and muggy back then. Litres of sweat, annoying waves of tiredness, laziness and bad mood provoking weather to be honest. Nevertheless, I found myself walking down a totally overcrowded street, fighting through a huge mass of people that were melting in the unbearable heat of the sun high above our heads. My head ached and pounded terribly, the loud street noises of grousing or laughing people in their either bad or incomprehensibly good mood didn't help this head ache to vanish either, so that I was forced to follow the slow crowd of shopping people for a long, long time like a sweating and very pissed off ice bear in the Sahara.
'Beauty knows no pain. So doesn't her preference for tea. Insane woman…'
Casting only one short glance at the blazing sun made me nearly blind for the next few minutes, and I almost ran into one of those freaky shopping idiots in front of me, when I suddenly felt delicate fingers wrap around my wrist, carefully but determined, and was pulled back just in time before I could crash into that stupid chit-chatting girl.
I sighed. Not because I was saved at the right time, not because I was prevented from getting into a nice morning fight with that tarted up bitch and from blowing off steam in my bad mood; no, it was because of the way I had been pulled back.
In former times, in our happy times, I would have felt two arms wrap around my waist, preventing me from running further and crashing into the person in front of me by pulling me into a tight embrace. And soon, I would have felt a hot breath of air tickle my right auricle and my ears would have caught a familiar melodic voice that would have whispered playfully with distinctive Kyoto-ben some indecent jokes to make me blush madly. And of course, being outraged, I would have yelled out her name and pretended to be angry at her, despite being in fact happy and feeling safe and content in her embrace.
It would have been…but it wasn't.
Our happy times were over. And there was no embrace I could flee to.
The only thing I felt was an aching coldness, a strange emptiness where once the short but warm and gentle touch of her smooth hand had been…and where it actually belonged.
"Natsuki should be more careful in this rushing crowd."
No hot breath tickled my ear, there were no indecent jokes my ears could hear, no playful giggling; just a friendly but distant comment on my clumsiness on this tiring hot day. I was disappointed.
Instead of seeking certain intimacy (touching and tickling and hugging me, even pecking my cheek and feeling the warmth of my body like she had done in the past whenever we had spent our free time together), she avoided intimate body contact and touched me only when it was necessary, like in this moment some seconds ago. I knew why and I hated it. I despised it.
I turned around to face the person to which this familiar voice belonged to and my weary eyes glanced at crimson ones, empty and glazed, but so deep and absorbing that I soon lost myself in them completely and forgot time and space, the street and the people around us.
Those were the only door to her well-hidden heart and her soul, and yet I wasn't able to understand what she thought or felt whenever I looked in those eyes. I had always been unable to read her mind, whether she masked it through faked smiles or not.
And this time wasn't different. Again she corked up her feelings.
Her full, sensual and strawberry red lips were curved into her standard smile she wore even when she was sleeping; her soft hands lay calmly one on top of the other and didn't sweat like mine did; and her chestnut hair shined in the sunlight like that of hair models in TV advertisements and was dry as if she had a ventilator integrated in her scalp, whereas mine was sweat soaked near the temples and neck.
She was perfect, unquestionably; just as perfect was her ability to hide her thoughts and emotions she didn't want to reveal or anybody to notice and to know.
Not even me…yeah, not even me.
"Ara, ara, is something wrong or why does Natsuki not move?", she asked me after a short time with that stupid standard smile across her beautiful face, while we were standing in the middle of that street in the middle of that crowd, looking at each other in a totally different way.
Her expression was the same as ever; it was this perfectly trained mask like that of a porcelain doll that kept on smiling and looking kind all the time.
Mine however was…empty.
Empty as my mind, empty as all of these useless thoughts buzzing in my head back and forth, but my heart was full of regret, full of suppressed anger and fear I wanted to cry out right in her obviously faked cheerful face that made me sick every time I saw it.
But somehow I couldn't. I just couldn't tell her what had upset me for weeks now and what hurt me every time we saw each other, because I didn't want the weight she kept on putting on her frail shoulders in self-punishment to be even heavier if she misunderstood me.
I didn't want her to suffer anymore for she had suffered enough because of me since we had known each other. I couldn't stand it anymore to see her in pain because of my naivety and ignorance and egoism.
I just wanted her to be happy.
And I wanted her to finally smile a real smile, not that fake one she was showing me now.
But making her happy was only possible in one way: to love her in the same way she loved me.
And I didn't know if I would ever be able to do so.
And she didn't either. That was why she was so afraid of touching me and getting near me, because she was afraid of my reaction if she started to treat me as intimately as in former times; as in our happy times before the HiME carnival in which her obsessive and possessive, unrequited love for me had driven her mad, which had resulted in her betrayal and abuse of my trust…and…my body.
And when I had found out, when I had rejected her in my disgust and my fear, her mind had gone totally blank and her heart had been as empty and cold as mine after the death of my mother.
Only the desire to take revenge and to destroy whatever had stood between us had kept her alive.
By forgiving her I had saved her as she had saved me in the flower field when we had first met, but I hadn't been able to erase her fear of being rejected by me again.
This fear was a menace – a parasite that tortured and fed upon her that stood between us like an insuperable wall and made us both suffer under its hands.
Surely everyone would have slapped me in the face and told me to make the first step and to approach her or at least to assure her that I had no problem with her getting near me, but I...
I just couldn't.
I was insecure after what had happened between the two of us. I failed at figuring out my feelings for her. One day I had been sure that I loved her, the other day I had wished I would never see her face again.
"Kanin na…kanin na, Natsuki. I'm…"
"It's all right now, Shizuru…it's all right."
Those words hadn't been a lie. There hadn't been moments when I had questioned them.
I had forgiven her for what she had done to me.
But I have never forgotten it.
That was why I couldn't make the first step. I had tried hard to rebuild our shattered relationship and to give our broken friendship a new chance by forgiving her because I loved her, maybe not the way she wished, but I really did. She was my most important person, I cared about her, I needed her, I truly loved her like I hadn't loved anybody like that before – and that is no foolish, cliché-ridden sentence taken out from a totally exaggerated love story, but the very truth. It is the truth. It really is…
However, the incidents during the HiME carnival had haunted me in my dreams, in my fantasy, since I couldn't remember what she had done to me, and had painted a picture of pure horror in my mind.
And that was even worse, because my fantasy punished me with terrifying nightmares that were obviously untrue but the more fearsome. They made her a monster I couldn't get near to, although I wanted to.
I felt like a schizophrenic.
"Natsuki? Are you alright?"
Her crimson eyes met mine, concerned and caring, and for a second I forgot the thoughts that had been haunting me until now and had worsened my already dreadful head ache; from the corner of my eye I saw her trembling hand moving instinctively towards my face, but again she pulled back and put her hand back onto the other where it had lain before.
I saw the pain flaring up in her eyes for just a second before she hid it behind emptiness.
"Natsuki is looking pale and tired. Shall we take a rest in the café over the way and cool down a little bit? I don't want you to be sun-struck."
She tilted her head to the side, the chestnut tresses of her silky hair were moving smoothly in this graceful movement and her lips curved into smile number 23, the 'everything will be fine if you do what I recommend'-smile I had already seen too often.
Yes, I knew every one of her smiles.
Our gazes locked like unbreakable chains, I nodded weakly in the end, whishing she would put her arm around my shoulders, pressing me as closely as possible to her, so that her warmth and her pleasant fragrance would calm me down, but she didn't; instead, her thin fingers made only short contact with my back and pushed me slightly towards the roadside before they let go of me after I had made the first step.
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"NO!!! SHIZURU!!!"
Desperately screaming, I shot up.
My mouth and my throat were dry like a desert and hurt terribly when I gulped. My head still ached as if I had bashed it against the next wall, and although my eyes were wide open in terror I couldn't see anything – everything was blurred and moving in a lifeless shade of grey.
It was dark. And it was cold.
My body was shaking and when I looked down at my freezing body, I noticed that I was wearing sweat soaked clothes that obviously didn't belong to me, but I couldn't figure out what exactly I was wearing just as I couldn't figure out where I was in the first place.
'Am I in a hospital?'
I was alone. No sign of Shizuru. Or else I would have heard her whispering my name.
"Shi…z…", I screeched weakly, but my voice failed immediately and couldn't create syllables more.
'Shizuru…where are you? Where am I…? What happened…?'
I tried to remember what had happened, how I had come here, anything, but the only thing I found was a big gap in my memory that had devoured everything that had happened between the moment I had picked up Shizuru at home for our tea shopping trip and now.
I felt lost and wanted to cry, but I couldn't.
The tears just didn't want to come as if the last drop of water in my body had been absorbed by my clothes.
Suddenly, I heard a door creaking and opening somewhere left from me and was blinded by dazzling light when I was turning my face in that direction to see who would come in.
"Natsuki!", a squealing voice called out in surprise and relief, "thank the gods, you have finally woken up."
At the beginning, I couldn't make out who it was because the voice and the person's shape were both blurred in my ears and my sight, but it had to be a girl coming near me because of the way she was moving.
She must had noticed that I was out of shape and in total confusion and desperation, because she sat down beside me on the bed and put both her hands carefully on my shoulders, squeezing them gently, and was probably looking at me worriedly.
"How do you feel?", she asked me after a few seconds in which I had looked at her as if I had been drunk, "you have been unconscious for almost two days now since the accident."
So I really had been taken to hospital…after an accident I couldn't even remember.
The girl bent a little bit forward to face me better in this barely illuminated room since she had forgotten to turn on the lights before rushing towards me, so that my nose was able to smell her striking flowery and fresh perfume that buried me in a cloud of penetrating smell.
I knew that perfume too well. It was Mai's and smelled hideous. I screwed my face up in disgust.
"Accident…?"
"You can't remember?!", Mai blurted out in shock and froze instantly after I hadn't reacted to her question.
"Mai…Wh-…where is…Shizuru?"
That was the only thing I cared about, the only thing I wanted to know.
But Mai hesitated conspicuously and remained suspiciously silent which made me worry.
"Is…is she alright? Was she involved…in the accident?"
My voice was still weak and was shaking with every word that I spoke. Mai remained silent.
"Where is she?!", I asked again, this time more desperately and frightened because of her silence.
'Something is wrong, terribly wrong.'
She took a loud and deep breath and obviously wanted to say something, but she hesitated again as if she couldn't arrange the words she wanted to say, as if it was too hard to give me an answer.
I shivered in fear. Something terrible must had happened.
"Kaichou-san…she is…", Mai started in distress, still calling her 'kaichou' although Shizuru had already graduated and was now student at Fuuka University, "actually it was her who had an accident. She was hit by a car when the two of you were crossing a street."
Silence.
A moment of unbearable and crushing silence followed.
I stared at her with a blank, unemotional expression in my face and wasn't able to realize her words, to understand the information she had given me, to analyze and to grasp the emotional content in that fact.
My mind was turned off, yet I felt my heart pounding madly when I dug my fingers into my chest and scratched nervously at the fabric of my clothes with my nails over and over again, grasping for air.
I was frozen. I was numb. I felt empty. I felt as if I had been dead.
'She had an accident…Shizuru had an accident…she was hit by a car…'
Those sentences rushed through my head again and again, but I didn't want to believe what they told me, I didn't want them to be true; I just couldn't stand it. It was a lie. It had to be a lie. And I had to be dreaming.
"Natsuki, listen…", I heard Mai talking again, but her voice seemed to be far away and barely audible.
I broke out in a cold sweat, wrapped my arms around myself when my body started trembling and images of horror were spreading in my mind – Shizuru covered in blood, seriously injured…even dead.
I started to panic.
"How could this happen?", I whispered frantically, trying to remember what had happened, but again I lost myself in that gap of vanished memories where I could find nothing but sheer emptiness.
"Natsuki, listen to me…She was badly wounded, but she survived…Do you hear me? Kaichou-san is alive."
She squeezed my shoulders firmly, by that forced me to look her in the eye, and nodded encouragingly.
"She's alive", I repeated faintly, sending those words like an echo through my head over and over again to make sure I had understood them right, when I saw Mai's hand moving up to my face, brushing one lost tress of my hair behind my ear and heard her saying: "Shhh, calm down. Everything will be fine, okay?"
Only then I noticed it: I had started crying and tears were flowing down my face like they hadn't been for a long time since the HiME carnival and Shizuru's betrayal.
But those tears were different.
They were tears of relief and of joy.
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I put my trembling hand on the silver door handle and felt its burning coldness rush from the tips of my fingers through my naked arms, spreading all over my body and freezing the hot blood in my veins.
I was afraid of what was awaiting me behind that closed door, and had already been standing there in the middle of a sterile and cold corridor for more than five minutes. I couldn't force myself to open the door and to face Shizuru, lying in a bed, littered with bruises and bandages, and looking weak and helpless.
"Fujino-san suffered serious brain injuries due to the impact on the windscreen, which fortunately acted as a buffer that saved her from being injured lethally. One of the police officers told me that she would have died if her head had struck the windscreen just a few centimeters lower at the spot were the windscreen and the car's bonnet come together. She had immense luck."
Before coming here, Shizuru's treating physician – a rather old and grey haired but very sympathetic and sensitive man who reminded me somehow of a pug because of his wrinkled face – had talked to me about her condition and about the car accident itself. While coming here, I had thought about his words over and over again, had repeated his sentences about a hundred times to make them less shocking and less hurting, but still my lungs failed to breathe and I felt as if I had a lump in my throat.
"Nevertheless, she suffered a basilar skull fracture and a second-degree skull-brain-trauma so that we had to put her in an artificial coma to give her brain the necessary rest to recover. In a coma, the human brain's activity is minimized considerably and is able to heal better, and first and foremost, faster. It will take one or two weeks before we can allow her to wake up, but the longer she remains in a coma the better."
I leaned my forehead against the white door, sighed in depression and let go of the door handle that had become hot and wet under the firm grip of my white knuckled hand, when one of the nurses, who had observed me curiously for some minutes, came over to me with fast and small steps and asked me:
"Do you want to pay Fujino-san a visit?"
She had an awfully high-pitched voice that annoyed me, especially because she shrieked right into my ear.
"Yeah. Are there any problems with that?", I responded coldly and wanted to get rid of her as soon as possible, but the evil and direful glare I shot at her didn't seem to bother her at all; instead, she smiled or rather grinned at me kind of importunately, and her hazelnut brown eyes were sparkling brightly in joy.
'What the heck is wrong with this chick? She's kinda…scary…'
"I'm so happy that finally someone's here to see Fujino-san! It is so saddening to see someone being in a hospital without any friends or family members visiting them, since people recuperate so much better when there is someone who looks after them and gives them strength and love…And Fujino-san hasn't been visited since her admission to the hospital three days ago, you know."
I stared at her cheerful face and wondered why she cared so much.
I wondered even more why Mai hadn't looked after Shizuru at least one time since she had looked after me every day for one or two hours.
But I wondered the most why neither Shizuru's 'friends', also known as her stupid and irritating fan club of squealing fan girls at the university, nor her parents or other family members had visited her until now.
I had never met her parents before and she hadn't told me much about them, but I knew that their relationship was rather tensed and that they didn't see each other very often since her parents lived in Shizuru's hometown Kyoto and took care of the family's successful company.
But that was no excuse as to why they couldn't take care of their seriously injured daughter in the hospital.
"May I ask you a personal question?", she asked politely, again smiling that enormous smile that almost covered half of her round pumpkin head, and her obviously bleached teeth were so blinding that I wished I had sun glasses with me to protect my tired and sleepy eyes.
"Yeah…sure…", I mumbled irritated by her and hoped she would leave me alone if I answered her question.
"Are you a friend of hers?"
I was silent.
I didn't know what to answer. I really didn't.
In former times I would have answered: "Yes, I am."
Without hesitation, without any doubts, maybe even with slight pride in my voice because I had been the best friend of Fujino Shizuru, the Student Council's president and most beautiful and intelligent of all at Fuuka Gakuen.
I had been what others had dreamt of, especially those of Shizuru's official fan club, and secretly had enjoyed the jealous looks they had shot at me and had often been full of hatred at the same time, which had made it much more enjoyable, though.
After the HiME carnival, however, our close friendship had been shattered into uncountable pieces.
For her, I was the girl who had refused her love.
For me, she was a dear friend who had betrayed me.
'Is it possible to rebuild our friendship under these circumstances?', had been my question whenever Shizuru and I had spent time together, but I had never found an answer.
So I just kept on hoping it would be possible in the end.
I didn't want to lose Shizuru. Never.
"I…I don't know...I think I am…", I stuttered eventually and avoided looking her in the eye. From the corner of my eye I could see how she tilted her head to the side, how she stared at me quizzically and visibly confused, as if she waited for further explanation, and how she parted her lips to say something after I had remained silent for the next minute.
I couldn't stand any more questions. I couldn't stand her anymore.
"Uhm, sorry, gotta go."
I quickly pushed the door handle down, rushed into Shizuru's room without paying any attention to the puzzled nurse, and slammed the door behind me as fast as I could to finally escape that nuisance.
And suddenly, I was there. And suddenly, I had to face what I had tried to avoid so hesitantly.
"Does she have to be operated on?" - "No. The brain injuries will heal by themselves and although both her legs have multiple bone fractures due to the massive impact, an operation is not necessary. We stabilized the broken bones and treated the minor bruises; the rest is up to Fujino-san herself."