Author's Note
Here you have it, folks. The fluffiest fluff I've ever fluffed. Modern!AU prompt for Day 22 of Jashi Month.
I'm actually... really proud of this one. I do hope you enjoy!
Drift
When he's six, he makes a friend.
He's playing by himself, tossing a ball up and down, occasionally throwing it against a wall and catching it as it bounces back. A sound from behind him distracts him and the ball bounces away from him to land at the feet of three older boys. The shortest of the three picks it up and taunts him when he tries to get it back. They toss the ball amongst themselves; one of the taller ones pushes him to the ground when he gets too close. They laugh and turn away, never giving the ball back.
The second they'd walked away his eyes began to glimmer with tears. He remembers his father's words. That nothing worth having was easily attained. That sometimes, one must fight for what is theirs. He stands up, balls his fists at his sides and prepares to follow them when a girl steps in their path.
She's much smaller than the three older boys but her eyes carry no fear. They only carry rage. The leader of the group opens his mouth to order her to leave but does not get the chance. The girl reels back and punches the boy in the gut.
The boy drops to the ground, dropping the ball to clutch his stomach. The girl picks up the ball and walks around the group. The other two boys are too stunned to really do much else than help their leader off the ground. They yell out to her but she turns her head and the look in her eyes is certain. She'll gladly do it again if she has to.
The girl walks back and hands the ball back to him. He thanks her quietly, still stunned at her bravery. She asks if she can play with him. He says yes.
When he's thirteen, he asks a question.
"Have you ever kissed anyone?"
She scrunches up her nose. "Ew, no. Why?"
He shrugs, pretending not to care. But he really, really does. "Someone from class said they played spin-the-bottle at the park after school. He said he kissed three girls."
"So? That's a stupid game, anyway."
"Have you ever played it?"
He can see her cheeks flush as she turns away. "No. But I don't want to. The boys from our school are gross. I don't wanna kiss any of them." She casually looks back at him. "Why? Do you wanna play it?"
"No way!" he laughs. He sputters a little as he laughs. "I don't think I could!"
"What do you mean?"
He shrugs again. He pretends not to care. Again. He's embarrassed that he brought this up at all but he's curious. And if he couldn't talk to his best friend, who could he talk to?
"I just... wanna know what it feels like," he says quietly. His ears burn as he blushes. "Girls kind of scare me. Sometimes, I don't think I'll ever know what it feels like."
"I'm a girl and you aren't scared of me."
"You're not really a girl."
She sticks her tongue out and laughs. "Shut up! I am, too, a girl!"
"Not to me!" he says. "You're my best friend! And I'm not scared of my best friend."
She'd been lying down on the floor, doodling in her notebook. He'd been sitting on her bed, half-heartedly working on some problems for his geometry class. She stands up and moves to sit next to him. He looks at her. She's quiet. She looks like she wants to say something but she also looks scared.
"Would you, um, want to try it?" she finally asks.
"What?"
"Kissing."
His eyes narrow in confusion. "I thought you said kissing was gross."
"I said the boys from school are gross." She rolls her eyes. "But... I dunno. Kissing might not be so bad. I figure if I do it with you, since you're my friend and I don't think you're gross, it might not be as... gross?"
"You said 'gross', like, three times."
She punches him. "Shut up, jerk!"
They laugh at each other, eventually winding down in a comfortable silence. She brushes back a lock of her hair and asks again. "So... do you want to try it?"
"Um. Okay." He nods slowly.
They clear a space on the bed and scoot next to each other. He's as nervous as he'll ever be but he's also excited. He can't believe this is actually happening. He licks his lips and leans forward.
"Don't lick your lips!" she says.
"Sorry!" He flinches back and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
It's a fumbling mess at first. Their noses bump into each other's when they don't know which way to tilt their heads. She reels back in disgust when he laughs at the wrong time and she kisses his teeth. He thinks this is a sign. He says that... maybe they should just give up. Save each other from the embarrassment.
She tells him no. She holds him by the sides of his head and dives in. Finally, their lips meet and his eyes snap open at the feeling.
They pull back from each other after a second, both blushing furiously. She drops her hands and tries to look away but he stops her. He leans back in to kiss her again and it feels so nice and his heart is thumping so loudly in his ears that he doesn't hear the door to her room open.
Her sister gasps. "I'm telling mom!"
She has to do her sister's chores for an entire month to get her not to tell.
When he's sixteen, he hears something unexpected.
"I love you."
She'd come to him earlier that night, climbing into his room through his window as she'd done so many times when they were kids. Her cheeks were flushed and shiny with tears. A boy she had been seeing broke up with her and she ran to the only person she knew she could talk to. He'd done his best to cheer her up. They ate ice cream from the carton and watched cartoons. They reminisced about happier times when they were younger.
He's holding her in his arms in his bed. Her voice was so small he almost thought he misheard her. He looks down at her and she looks up at him and she says it again.
"Um, I know you may not believe me. But I do. I always have." She sits up next to him and her bottom lip begins to tremble. Tears slip from her eyes and her voice cracks as she speaks. "I was just scared because you're my best friend and I didn't want to screw up what we already have and—oh my god—I'm so sorry because I know I sound crazy and I totally understand if you don't feel the same way—"
He silences her with a kiss. It's quick and chaste but it works. He wipes her tears away with his fingertips and tilts her chin to look up at him. His heart is pounding. Whether with fear or giddiness he can't tell and he doesn't care because he never thought he'd get to say these words out loud.
"I love you, too."
They kiss again, slowly, taking their time to get used to expressing feelings they've never felt before. Their shyness begins to leave them, as do their clothes.
One thing leads to another, as it often does with many their age, and they surrender themselves to each other in the quiet dark of the night.
When he's eighteen, they go their separate ways.
He'd decided to follow in his father's footsteps and enlist in the military. His first month of training begins in a few weeks.
She'd been accepted to a school across the country, one that she would have been crazy to turn down. Yet, she hesitated. If she left, she didn't know when she'd return home. She came from a large family, one without the means to fly her back every break.
He'd urged her to go, telling her that her happiness was all that mattered.
He sees her the night before she leaves. She tells him she loves him and that no amount of distance would ever change that.
At first, things were difficult but hopeful. She calls him every night and tells him about her classes. She's making friends. She cries the first time he calls her from base. She can't believe anyone would be so cruel to cut his hair so short.
He misses her terribly but the rigors of his training often leave him too exhausted to call her. She tells him she worries about him. He laughs and tells her not to. He genuinely enjoys the challenge.
After a while, their calls become shorter and shorter. The time between them stretches. It's neither one's fault. They're both exceptionally bright and with that comes responsibility. She's busy with school and he's preparing to move again to another base.
He becomes busier and busier. He's made friends of his own. Eventually, he even goes on a few dates. They're building their lives away from each other and it's only natural to drift apart.
Yet every time she calls, he answers. And when she does, he smiles. She looks happy. And he's happy, too.
He reaffirms himself that it's all that really matters.
When he's twenty-two, he comes home.
He'd decided to leave the military after his first contract was up so he could attend school. His short stint offered him a breadth of experience, meeting people from all over the world. He'd traveled to a few countries offering aid to those in need.
He enrolls in a university far away from home. In a completely different country. He's studying international relations and linguistics. He thinks about reenlisting one day to become an interpreter but he won't make that decision until he's finished his degree.
He's in his old room, packing up things he'd once left behind before he moves again. He comes across a small strip of film. A series of photos he'd taken with this then best friend and former girlfriend; taken in a photo booth at a county fair back in high school. They made silly faces at the camera for most of them. The last photo is them engaged in a kiss.
He smiles and laughs to himself quietly at the memory. He wonders how she's doing. He can't remember the last time he'd talked to her. It must have been a year or two ago. He wonders if she's about to graduate. He wonders what career she's chosen. He wonders if she'll come home. Perhaps he should give her a call.
He's interrupted by an incoming call on his phone and sets the photo down to answer it. He doesn't mean to but he forgets about the photos. Forgets about calling her.
He doesn't think of her for the rest of the day.
When he's twenty-seven, he's in a car accident.
Had he not been changing radio stations, he may have seen the offending vehicle that had just run a red light. He's lucky he's not far into the intersection. The car only hits the front of his car on the driver's side. It's hard enough, though, that he hits his head on the side of his window.
He's sitting on the sidewalk with his head in his hands. If anything, he's annoyed at how much of a fuss everyone was making. He's fine! He'd felt a touch of dizziness after he'd exited his car but that was gone. He's sporting a bit of a headache but it was nothing aspirin couldn't fix. Was an ambulance really necessary?
He wishes this would all go away. He just wants to get to work. He's recently returned home, having taken a year off to travel a bit after finishing his degree. He'd accepted a teaching position at a local college. He loves his job and wants to make sure he doesn't ruin it by not showing up so early in his career.
He hears someone kneel down in front of him but he doesn't lift his head.
"Sir? Sir, can you hear me? You've been involved in a car accident and we believe you may have a concussion. How are you feeling?"
"I'm fine," he groans. He finally lifts his head to look at the EMT knelt in front of him. His breath catches so quickly he nearly chokes.
"Ashi?"
"Jack?"
The moment is surreal. He blinks a few times. Perhaps he'd made a mistake but there isn't one to be made. Ashi is dressed in a dark, collared shirt. There's a bag of medical supplies at her side. Ashi, his oldest friend, is kneeling right before him and his mind empties as if he's never formed a thought in his life.
Her head twitches slightly, as if clearing her own thoughts. "Um, you have been involved in a car accident," she repeats, almost monotonously. "We think you may have suffered a minor concussion. We'll have to take you to the hospital—"
She's still speaking but he can't register the words. All he can hear is a faint ringing in his ears. His heart is in his throat. He's finding it difficult to breathe. He can't believe that she's right here in front of him. His best friend.
His first love.
He thought years of separation would have waned his feelings. It's been so long since he'd thought of her. Even longer since he'd seen her. Nearly ten years. But she's here now and he's sixteen again. She's even more beautiful than he remembered.
He doesn't even realize what he's doing until he feels the warmth of her lips. He cradles her jaw with his hands and kisses her so gently he's not sure if it's real.
He pulls back and her cheeks are flushed. Her mouth is slightly open in shock. He drops his hands from her cheeks and to both parties' surprise, he laughs.
"Perhaps," he says, wearing a lop-sided grin with the realization of what he's done. "I hit my head harder than I thought."
When he's twenty-eight, he asks her out.
It hadn't been his intention. He'd returned to the hospital a few days after his accident—and, yes, a few days after his twenty-eighth birthday—to thank her for helping him. And to apologize for kissing her. Once his system had calmed and he had been evaluated at the hospital, he was unable to catch another glimpse of her. He knew what he had done was inappropriate.
He catches her as she's on a break and he accompanies her to the hospital's cafeteria for coffee. He tells her a little bit about what he's been up to since high school. She laughs when he mentions leaving the military. She's happy that he's no longer enlisted, if for no other reason, that he's been able to grow his hair out again.
Their break is cut short when she gets an alert that she needs to return to work. She thanks him for the coffee; tells him it's good to see him again. The words tumble out of his mouth before he can talk himself out of it.
"Would you like to have dinner tonight?"
He gets to the restaurant a few minutes before she does. He's astoundingly nervous. He knows there's certainly enough topics of conversation between them. But he's worried about how much she may have changed. How much he's changed. What if they don't get along anymore?
By the time their main course arrives he doesn't feel nervous anymore. She's still the same smart, tough as nails girl he'd been best friends with. She tells him about her life. How she'd taken two years off after undergraduate to join the peace corps and bolster her application to medical school.
She's in her third year of medical school now, hoping to become a pediatrician. She's happy the school is only an hour away from her hometown. Their hometown. She tells him about how much she missed living here while she was in college and how happy she is to be back and thrive in the community.
She tells him she had a boyfriend in college. A serious one. They'd even talked about getting married one day. But as the stresses of their final year took hold, they'd drifted apart. She didn't seem too upset by it. It's natural for people to drift apart.
He knows the feeling. She apologizes then, for not returning his calls. She says she's sorry for being a bad friend. He tells her there is nothing to apologize for. After all, he repeats, it's natural for people to drift apart.
She's quiet when they leave the restaurant. She tells him... she doesn't think this is a coincidence. That they both ended up back here. They've both done extraordinary things: traveled the world, met so many different people; and yet here they are. Everything that has happened in their lives has brought them back here. Together.
A spark is ignited. And this time, he doesn't bother apologizing for kissing her.
When he's thirty-one, he has a full-blown panic attack.
This night was supposed to be special. Because on this day, twenty-five years ago, they met. This was a cause for celebration.
Yet everything about the evening had been a disaster. Their cab driver had gotten lost, making them twenty minutes late to their reservation, forcing them to wait another thirty minutes for a new table. The restaurant was uncharacteristically busy and their food was slow to arrive.
Most unnerving of all was how quiet Ashi had been throughout dinner. Almost distant. She kept looking at him with an odd expression, as if she had a question on the tip of her tongue but could not bring herself to ask.
Their table is cleared. This was supposed to be his moment. He doubts himself. She would probably not appreciate this setting anyway. Right? Perhaps they could go for a walk after dinner? She'd like that, wouldn't she?
He reaches into his pocket and frowns when nothing is there. He tries to check his coat pockets discreetly but there's no way he could hide the expression on his face as his heart splashes into his stomach.
He runs his feet around the floor to try and feel for anything he may have dropped. His eyes dart around but the lighting is too dim to see properly. He scoots his chair back and tries to look around.
"Jack?" she asks quietly. "Is everything alright?"
"Um, yes," he says, trying to keep the nervousness out of his voice. "I just think, I, um—" He cuts himself off and drops down to the floor to continue his search. Nothing is there. He stands up, eyes wide, and sputters.
"Excuse me."
"Jack, wait!"
He doesn't listen. He runs to the front of the restaurant and frantically asks the hostesses if they've recovered any lost items. Nothing. He checks his pockets again, hoping this was all some crazy fluke but still—nothing. He calls the cab company in hopes someone had found it.
No luck. And now he can't think of anything else to do and everything is ruined.
He comes back to the table and his hands shake as he pulls his seat out. He can't bring himself to look into her eyes as he sits down.
"Jack?" Her voice breaks through his thoughts but he still doesn't lift his head. "Look at me, Jack? Please?"
He sighs and looks at her. There's tears in her eyes. His face falls. Everything really is ruined.
"You know I love you. Right?" His mind immediately jumps to the worst possible conclusion. She's been quiet all night and now she looked like she was going to cry and he feels like this is the end and everything is his fault.
"I've loved you my whole life," she says. She looks down at her lap for a moment and then places something on the center of the table.
A small, black velvet box. The very item he thought he'd lost. He looks up at her as a tear falls to her cheek but she doesn't lift a hand to wipe it away. "It... fell out of your pocket in the cab."
He moves without thinking. He's not just down on one knee. He's down on both knees. Apologizing for everything. Her bottom lip trembles as she smiles. Her hand lifts to reach out and touch him but she pulls back, hands folded on her lap. She takes a deep breath before she speaks.
"Is there... something you wanted to ask me?"
She's giving him an in. A golden-paved pathway to let everything out. He'd planned every moment of this night down to every word he wanted to say to her. But just like everything else this evening, nothing went according to plan. His mind is so shaken that those carefully planned words escape him, but it doesn't matter because there's only one thing he really needs to say.
"Will you marry me?"
"Oh, thank god," she laughs, blowing air from her cheeks as if she were holding her breath. Another tear falls to her cheek and he reaches up to brush it away. His eyes widen as she unfolds her hands from her lap and holds up her left hand. The diamond sparkles in the soft light.
"Because I already said 'yes.'"
When he's thirty-three, he calls an ambulance.
Ashi's in labor and her cries are getting louder. Her car is in the shop and his car won't start and he'd called a cab nearly thirty minutes ago and there was still no sign of it and he now had no choice.
He's juggling Ashi's phone and his phone in his hands, the two lighting up like Christmas trees. He's trying to talk to her mother but it's hard to hear over Ashi's yelling and the constant notification that there are several more calls incoming. His mother is on the line on his phone and he can't even comprehend what she's saying. He finally can't take it anymore and puts the two phones up to his mouth and shouts.
"Just meet us at the hospital!"
He scrambles around and she's covering her mouth trying to muffle her screams. She tells him she's sorry and he tells her not to be and that he's got everything under control and everything is going to be fine. He's looking for the supplies they'd carefully put together in preparation for this moment and his brain can't remember which closet it's in. He runs up the stairs and gets about halfway up when he remembers it's in the downstairs closet, not the upstairs closet, and he should have checked the downstairs closet first because now he's wasted time going to the upstairs closet when the downstairs closet was closer.
He sees the lights from the ambulance out of the window and nearly trips on a rug running to the door and throwing it open. He runs back to the closet and gathers her bag, bringing down a couple of extra blankets that he's not sure they'll need but he may as well take them because it's better to have them and not need them than to need them and not have them.
They get to the hospital and it's just more chaos. A few of Ashi's sisters are there, his mother and father are there, her mother and father are there and Ashi reaches out to her mother and Ashi's mother doesn't think twice before following her daughter and the hospital staff to the maternity ward. Her mother had given birth to seven children, including two sets of twins, so she knew a thing or two about labor.
By the time they get to the delivery room, Ashi's screaming and he just holds her hand, not having a clue of what else to do. Her mother is barking out demands and Ashi looks at him with tears in her eyes, begging him to make her stop and he reaches out to try but his hand is slapped away so he just runs it through Ashi's hair and that's when the doctor's tell her to push.
There's more screaming and he just tells her that he loves her, he loves her, over and over again until a new cry breaks through the commotion and the tears of pain turn to tears of joy.
And finally, there's quiet.
He's sitting in a rocking chair, holding his now sleeping son next to his sleeping wife. He'd spent months preparing for this moment. But there was no way—no way—he could ever have imagined how profoundly his life could change in that moment.
Now, he can't imagine how his life could be anything else.
When he's thirty-nine, his son comes home with a new friend.
"Dad! Can me and Olivia play in my room?"
He's sitting in the kitchen, feeding his two-year-old daughter a snack after she'd just woken from a nap. He smiles at his son and introduces himself to his friend. His son grabs his friend by the hand and excitedly runs away with her.
Ashi had narrowly avoided being run into by the giggling children and comes into the kitchen to stand next to him. She kneels down and kisses her baby girl on the forehead.
"It's like looking into a window to the past, isn't it?" she says with a grin. He returns the smile his wife and hears the two screaming and laughing from all the way across the house as they run up the stairs to play. It's a thought that had certainly occurred to him. After all, he'd met his best friend at the same age. He wonders if history will repeat itself.
It may not. Chances are the two could be friends for a few months. Maybe a few years. Maybe they'll become inseparable. Maybe they'll have a fight and never speak again. Maybe they'll fall in love. Or maybe they'll just simply drift apart.
But maybe, he thinks. He wraps an arm around his wife. His best friend. His childhood sweetheart. He tilts his head up to kiss her softly on the lips. Just maybe...
They'll drift back together again.
Author's Note
I hope it goes without saying but thank you so much for reading. I had a mighty need for a childhood sweetheart!AU featuring my favorite couple and I'm actually really, really proud of this. It actually feels weird to say that... but that's a good thing, right? I shouldn't feel weird in saying I'm proud of something but eh, what can I say.
As always, reviews are welcomed and extremely appreciated. Thank you so, so much. Love you all.