She sat on the uncomfortable bench at the train station. It wasn't so much of a station as it was a stop. It wasn't bustling like stations at cities like central. If anything, it was empty, save for perhaps one or two groups of a handful of people, waiting for their own specific acquaintances to get off the train. It never seemed to rain in Risembool; the sun was always bright and warm and there was always the sweetest breezes caressing the vibrant grass.

Endlessly she sat, staring off somewhere into the space immediately in front of her. Playing that endless waiting game she had forever been its sole player. A quiet game of silence with no rules other than there was no winner. No one ever won. It just ended.

So, she waited.

All that time keeping her at arm's length, it was to protect her. They had been through so much, so very much. All those challenges and horrors they had faced had changed them. She had watched them grow, become themselves in a way that she herself would never understand. She wanted to know what had made them become who they were; she wanted to understand so that, maybe, she could grow too.

She had resented them for a time. Hated them for keeping her so far away, at such a painful distance. All she had ever wanted was to be a part of their lives, not just a fleeting thought and a visit whenever her help was wanted.

Wanted, not needed. It hurt, not being needed.

But it was all in an effort to protect her. And not in the way one would think. They likely knew that if they shared the things they had experienced with her, she would treat them differently. Like these experiences had changed them.

But they didn't want to consider themselves changed. They wanted to remember who they had once been, the innocent children who had never known an evil. Or, more likely, they wanted someone, at least one person, to remember them that way.

Someone to treat them like rotten kids once in a while, not as war heroes or victims of an awful catastrophe. And would love them for the rotten kids they were. That one person would welcome them back happily, with arms wide open. They wouldn't be restricted to act as they would be expected to having been through all the things they kept from her. They could forget the world and just be careless with them. That person would be their final resort, their final goal. The one they would return to when the horrors were finished. That one person who holds onto a time that was blissful, just for them.

So she was needed. Just in a way she hadn't expected.

And upon her realizing this fact, it didn't bother her; them keeping her at arm's length all this time.

Because she would always be there, in the end. And it would be like nothing had changed.

A/N: Just a little 502 word drabble to keep me distracted from my writer's block in Paper Lilies.

Thanks for reading, review if ya want? .'

-Rain