/ Hi there! I've always wanted to do a collection of bits-and-pieces stories. Some of these will have more plot than others. Thank you for reading. Please take time to leave a review. Thanks! /
Rain
Mai would often use public transportation to get to her job at SPR. She knew that the majority of the members of the group had cars, and she was fairly certain that Masako Hara had a personal chauffeur. However, there was no way that she herself would have a car of her own any time soon, what with being an orphan and still in school at that. No, Mai Taniyama would not take a car.
She didn't mind the public transit systems at all. In fact, she felt a quiet tranquility in riding them most of the time. However, there were certain specific situations in which she took to avoiding the system and walked instead. The first was during rush hour because those places could get uncomfortably crowded amazingly fast. Another was when she was sick. She knew she was making it harder on herself by walking to wherever she was going, but she took a sort of 'martyr's pride' in knowing that she was protecting those around her from the fate she was suffering. It made her feel just a little bit heroic. Mai Taniyama: Defender of the Innocents, both alive and dead. She knew she was romanticizing, but it still made her giggle to herself as she walked anyway.
The third situation which would lead Mai to walking was rain. She knew it was absurd, and it was one of the things that she would tell her close friends about which would cause them to shriek and giggle. "Mai, you'll freeze to death!" they would say to her in the winter. "Then your colleagues will have to hunt you down and exorcise you!" They would all be giggling at this point, Mai especially, at the thought of SPR trying to stop her as a ghost. She knew all of their tricks, she could definitely put up a fight!
And sometimes it was very cold. Sometimes, she'd come into work and her fingers would be numb as she would hang her coat up, and still numb as she would pull files out for Naru or Lin. Sometimes it took until she had made Naru his tea for them to thaw. But it was worth it. She loved the rain, even in the winter. It was amazing to her how the water cycle worked, the way it took what had fallen and brought it up high in elegant formation as clouds, and then dropped it again as rain. It reminded her of life and death and the work that she did. Yet, even before she had come to work for SPR, and long before she had seen her first ghost, she had loved the rain. There was something about the smell of the air when rain fell, or the refreshing feeling of it hitting her skin. Maybe it was the memory she held dear of her mom running around with her, jumping like idiots in a summer rain, slipping in the mud of the park, splashing about, soaking wet and full of joy.
Mai loved the rain, even when it froze her, or drove like needles into her skin with a bitter wind. She loved it even when she was already sick and cold and her friends were telling her to come inside already. She loved seeing it land on the windows of the van while on the way to a case. She would trace her fingers with the droplets and Naru would look at her and roll his eyes. She knew it was childish, but Mai loved the rain.