With Eyes Open~
He saw her and the world teetered on an edge.
She was beautiful, to say the very least. Happy, blonde, energetic. Everything he wasn't. Nigel smiled at the girl who stood next to him, running her fingers along the books' spines and mumbling the call numbers to herself. She carded a hand through her cropped blonde hair.
He continued to stare at her as she suddenly frowned. Nigel looked down at the thick volume grasped in his hand, knowing he had pulled it from the same shelf only moments before. "Is this what you're looking for?" he asked. He held the book up for her to see.
Light, light blue eyes flicked over to him, as if this beautiful girl had not noticed his presence. "Yeah, actually. Do you mind?"
"Not at all." Nigel passed the book over to her. Frantically, he attempted to memorize her face before she walked away. He'd seen her somewhere before, he knew it.
A smile. A startlingly perfect smile, grace her face. Alarming only because it seemed impossible to him that this girl could be any more flawless. Nigel almost had to beg himself not to press his lips against that perfect mouth. "Thanks!"
A giggle. Nigel snapped his head to the side in search of the familiar laughter. A child, a child in a tiger-striped sweater with a colander of all things perched atop her sunny hair, sat against the wall, knees pulled tight to her chest.
The little girl that starred in his dreams every single night.
"What?" the girl with the book asked. Nigel turned back to meet her ice colored gaze as she bent her body to the side in order to glance around him. Cocking an eyebrow when she found nothing was behind him.
The little girl was gone. And, studying the young woman again, she wasn't quite as beautiful as he'd originally thought. Her eyes were wrong, her hair too yellow, her smile missing some vital piece.
"Well," she stated, "it was nice meeting you, anyway."
He nodded, still wondering where the little girl had gone. The girl with the book began walking off, swinging her hips in a way that should've been irresistible to him. And, then the mismatched girl was back. She slipped her tiny hand into the woman's larger one. The woman didn't shake the child off, didn't even seem to notice a thing.
Glancing over a black and orange shoulder at Nigel, the little girl presented a challenge he found he could not deny.
"Why don't you come and find me?"
And then she was gone.
A/N: Hm. I was gone for a while, wasn't I? Well, a while for me. This was Pre-Thalia Universe, if you didn't catch that. I'm digging these, even though they are ridiculously far from canon.
And, if you're interested, the song version of Nigel's predicament in this universe is "Natalie Marie and 1cc" by The Spill Canvas