Over Him
by Mirune Keishiko
Chapter Two
Catching Up
She wandered listlessly among the displays of sparkling crystal and gleaming silver, her gaze shadowed and distant, drifting from one expensive and beautiful item to another—until there was a sharp tapping at the glass just beyond, and, startled, Megumi looked up to find Sano grinning at her through the window.
"I don't have time for lunch," she said uselessly, halfheartedly digging in her heels into the sidewalk like a child as he tugged her along. "I have too much to do at the dorm. I gave myself just five minutes to look for something for the wedding—"
"—and you spent a grand total of fifteen minutes going through that store like a zombie." Sanosuke, seeing Megumi's eyes light up despite herself at the sign over the restaurant's door, pushed her gently inside. "I know you know this is the only place in town that really knows its tea."
Only when she sat cradling the cup of fragrant, unsweetened otsuusan did Megumi realize how much the early autumn air had chilled her fingers. But the satisfied gleam in Sano's eyes from across the table brought annoyance in a wash of heat over her cheeks, and she drowned what would have been a grudging, grateful smile in faintly bitter tea.
"I'd thank you"—cocking one slim eyebrow—"but I have the funny feeling I'll end up paying for this anyway."
Sano placed his hands over his heart with a wounded look, and just then their food arrived. Megumi had tried to insist that it be wrapped and ready for her to take out, but Sanosuke, with his most charming grin and a semblance of a leer finely calculated to flatter, had won the blushing young waitress over to his side.
"Fifteen minutes," stated Megumi flatly, already delving into her mushrooms and rice, "and not a second more."
But fifteen minutes passed, and she never noticed; Megumi had not talked with Sanosuke or any of the others in weeks, pleading exams to study for, lectures to attend, extra credit assignments to complete. When had she stopped enjoying their company, she wondered—but lately she had been glad for the easy excuses to hide herself away in her schoolwork, away from the enviable happiness of her two recently engaged friends.
But med school was a hard and lonely life, and Sanosuke—whatever else she thought of him—the only human being in the world she felt comfortable swearing at. So she found herself telling him the little stories she had collected one by one over the past few weeks, each silly or angry or just the slightest bit resigned, about her classmates and teachers and bits of cadavers; she had kept these bottled up inside her all this time that she had had no one else to tell them to, and it felt good to finally let them spill. And she was still shaking her head and grinning ruefully down at the dregs of her tea when he gave her his own rueful smile and pointed up at the clock on the wall.
"Forty-five minutes, Megitsune."
She swore at him again—perhaps also because she wouldn't be able to do it for a while, not until the next time they met, which, she told herself, for the sake of her studies, should be never. She had caught up her bag and her books and was getting up to leave when he reached out to still her with a hand on her arm.
"Don't make me have to hunt you down again, kitsune-onna," he said quietly, with a perfectly serious smile. "Some people can be a total pain in the ass when they're worried about you."
She thought of Kenshin, always caring about everyone but himself, and bit back the words that flew to the tip of her tongue—Never quite worried enough. The hand on her arm was solid, warm, strong; she thought she felt her blood pulse beneath his palm.
She put on her sweetest smile. "I'm fine, toriatama. There's no reason for me not to be."
And she left before he could realize that she had stranded him with the bill this time.
tsuzuku
A/N. "Otsuusan" is a type of sencha, one of several varieties of Japanese green tea; I got this, and plenty more information than I now know what to do with, from o-cha(dot)com.
On and off the past several months, it's occurred to me to maybe continue where I left off in "Tell Me What the Rain Knows." It seemed pretty warmly received (many thanks, as always, to those who read and reviewed!), and now in my themes-based fic community-joining mania I have something to work with at last. beams (Themes here: "unsweetened tea" and "reaching".)
And so I've changed the title and made a very few edits to the body of the previous chapter, but otherwise kept things as they used to be. I dunno, I'm a bit obsessive and I like preserving things for posterity... or something. :p
Just let me know if I'm getting boring or repetitive or terribly unoriginal (as well as the usual: wrong characterization, facts, or whatever); I have the creeping fear that that's exactly what might happen to me...
It's interesting not to nail myself to a clear-cut narrative outline for once, so that, although this story will proceed chronologically in a fairly neat and orderly manner, chapters I think will be a little more random, a little more here-and-there than usual.
I hope you enjoyed reading this. See you in the next chapter!