a/n: rediscovering all my old oneshots.
dedication: to boredom.
disclaimer: i own nothing.
summary: Memories are flashes, imprints of noise and sight and smell on the unraveling scroll of time. – Naru/Mai.
history
- "Are you sure it's me you love? –
Mai whimpered and clutched the tearstained pillow closer, her eyes burning with emotion, with the tears she didn't have left.
She couldn't blame him – he'd been just as hurt as her, grieving over his brother's death, over wounds that never healed and opened at the slightest provocation.
- "Four. I'm sorry, did I scare you?" –
His smile – first so fake it was almost plastic, the warmth never reaching his eyes. Then later, in her dreams, the image she always wished to see in reality; Gene's smile on Naru's face.
- "You have good taste." –
So arrogant, so self-centered, so vain – he truly earned the title narcissist. Mai had to choke back a sob as she remembered the emotions that had flashed across Naru's face when she came up with his nickname – shock and confusion and so much hope that it nearly broke Mai's heart to remember those eyes.
- "Have you met my friend, Mai?" –
She used to think he was so miserly and so self-absorbed…but he had cheered her up with PK, using up so much energy he collapsed – all to tell her that it would be okay.
- "Mai, tea." –
He never showed his appreciated for her brewing but after weeks of indignation at his attitude – of taking everything for granted – Mai began to notice the smaller things. The way he asked only her, ignoring that Ayako was a miko proficient in making tea and Masako was raised in the traditionalist ways of female etiquette. He never touched the refreshments his clients offered either.
To Mai, it was a subtle gesture telling her that only her tea would suffice.
She wondered how he'd survive in England.
- "If the other students are criminals, what does that make you? Murderer!" –
Mai got off her bed to answer the ringing doorbell, but let it be when she saw that it was Ayako.
They would never understand. She – she loved him. Him, Oliver Davies the Narcissist, the man that captured her interest with cold rationality and unflinching apathy and won her heart with soft caring and barbed possessiveness.
The man who had apologized when she was the one who was wrong.
- "I told you to keep her in your sight!" –
He may have acted like he didn't care, but Naru had still formed deep bonds with the other members of the team, bonds which had ripped like paper once he informed them of the real reason SPR existed.
Bonds that he himself had shattered when she ran through the airport, her confession at her lips.
- "Goodbye, Mai." –
Mai buried her face back into her pillow, feeling her heart ache as she curled up into a ball.
Two words – two fleeting words, a blip in the grand scale of history, an insignificant memory shrouded in her past – was all it took to send everything crashing down.
le fin
a/n: here you go.