A/N: ayo, long time no see. I've had this wip sitting between my docs since November, and I just recently got around to finish it. There's not much to explain; I wrote this because, as a lesbian, I can't believe SNK gave Terry and Andy such BOMBSHELLS of love interests and they haven't wifed them up yet. Such a fucking waste. Let Mary and Mai just date each other at this point, cowards.
(crossposted in AO3).
In hindsight, Terry should've noticed when Mary's love started slipping away from his fingers like sand, should've seen coming the day where she would wake up and realize she deserved much better than beating around the bush with Terry, pleading for an answer that never came—What are are?—and just leave him to find someone who could answer that question with the honesty she deserved.
But as hard headed as he was, he thought it was probably nothing. He believed Mary was just stressed with work, catching bad guys, investigating people and then some.
"How many bad guys did my good girl catch?" He'd greet her whenever she came home from work, stretching her sore muscles with an exhausted expression, while Terry would be laying on their sofa, a beer in one hand and the remote control in the other.
"Not enough," she'd reply, a grimness to her tone that indicated Terry that it had probably been a bad day.
"You want to drink about it?" He'd offer, unable to offer anything else, since his ability to offer solutions was worse than his short attention span. And alcohol could cure everything, right?
But Mary would simply sigh, rub her temples and tell him she was going to get a shower before heading to bed, that maybe other day she'd take him up on his offer but not today. And Terry would simply nod, muster an "okay, honey," and go on with his life until it was time for bed and he'd join an already asleep Mary under the sheets.
The signs were there, Terry just lacked the ability to see them. But either way, if he had picked up on her behavior changes, he certainly would've never guessed that Mary would replace him with his own sister-in-law.
Now, Andy had been as equally if not more blind than Terry, for whatever reason that might be—it was easier to notice the redflags that something was going on when it came to Mai.
He should've known something was going on when she stopped trying to be close with him all the time, demanding attention from him and being all over him. He should've noticed the way her face wouldn't lit up anymore at the sight of him, a toothy smile tugging at the corners of her lips as she tried to sweet talk him to get some crumbs of affection.
Mai Shiranui was sick of chasing him around the world, wasting her life away for a man that would never love her back.
But Andy decided to ignore the red flags, stay blissfully unaware of the way Mai's affection towards him was starting to wither.
"Do you think Mai is mad?" Joe had asked one day, when they were at King's bar. Mai had turned up, looking as breath-taking as she always did, and they had been annoyed for a second at the prospect of having their "boys night" crashed by her—but then, she perched herself against the bar, showing no signs of wanting to approach them, or even acknowledging their presence.
Andy was too distracted by the relief that washed over him to even consider this as a weird occurrence, thinking Mai had finally decided to respect his boundaries.
"No, I don't think. It's Mai who we're talking about," he said with a shrug, drowning his drink in one go to appease his sudden thirst. How naive had he been.
Terry had pursed his lip, before taking a swig from his beer. "Yeah, exactly," he pointed out, "It's Mai. She'd usually be making a beeline for our table by now," Terry argued, with a thoughtful tone that was much too foreign for him. Andy stopped mid-movement, realizing his brother was right, before turning to glance at Mai, who was happily chatting with King.
Andy supposed later that his stare was burning a hole through Mai's neck; she turned around, looking puzzled, and her eyes roamed around the bar until she caught their eye. His whole body tensed, thinking she'd jump out of her seat any moment—instead, she just smiled, waved at them, and turned around to keep talking with King.
And as relieved as he felt, Andy also knew something was wrong. But as stubborn as he was, he took for granted he'd always have Mai by his side—after all, she had always been loyal to him, whether he reciprocated her feelings or not. Andy's downfall was taking Mai's eternal love for granted, he'd realize later.
Mai didn't intend to have an affair with Mary; it just happened.
It happened, mostly, because it had started to sink in the fact Andy would never like her like she wanted him to. She wasn't a lovestruck teenager anymore, the years were going by, and she was closer to being thirty than twenty. Mai had tried her best to be patient, to wait for Andy to come around and accept her love and live out of the hopes he gave her in his rare moments of intimacy and vulnerability. But no amount of hope could prevent her love from dying out at some point.
If she were to be honest, she'd never been interested in women before, mostly due to the fact that she grew up surrounded by men, and her only female friends hadn't really caught her attention in that way—King had confused her a little when she met her, her androgyny making it hard to know if she was a woman or a man, but that was the only time Mai could recall doubting of her sexuality.
Then Mary came along.
She'd known Mary for quite some time, she thought of her as a friend, often joking they would one day get to call each other sisters-in-law for real, when their men got their shit together and stopped being cowards. But then they started spending more and more time together, hanging out at King's bar on the odd day where their respective "partners" weren't there.
And Mai was feeling so damn lonely, so exhausted from constantly sucking up to Andy for any crumb of affection, trying to be satisfied with their training sessions at Mai's dojo, that it was easy to let herself fall for Mary, to wonder what would taste like kissing her lips after she had a smoke session before going home to her deadbeat boyfriend, to daydream about saying fuck it and runaway with Mary, maybe not back to Japan, but somewhere that wasn't South Town, where nobody knew them and where they could build a new life together, ignoring the time they've wasted with the Bogard brothers.
Then, one night where the alcohol was pouring and her frustration with Andy was as high as it could possibly be, Mai allowed her hands to linger on the back of Mary's thighs, before taking her hand to guide her to the bathroom and lock themselves in a stall, making out in a frenzy, feeling more euphoric in that fleeting moment than they've had in the past years.
Their encounters continued, neither thinking too much about the men in their lives once they crossed the doors of Illusion. King's bar was perfectly safe for them due to the fact that, if by any chance anyone saw something, King wasn't a snitch, and they could excuse themselves by saying everyone around them was too drunk and it was too dark to even see things straight.
But soon feelings were involved, thus forcing Mai and Mary to sit down, and talk about where this was going, and—the question both became to dread—what were they?
"Believe me or not, but I've never been with a woman like this before," Mai confessed in the intimacy of her apartment, when Mary had asked if she'd ever been with someone besides Andy.
Mary had cocked a brow, a lopsided smile appearing on her face as she snorted a laugh. "Are you serious? You didn't even have a phase where you tried to experiment with your college friends?" She narrowed her eyes, skeptical, but Mai just shrugged.
"To do that I would have to go to college, and unfortunately, that wasn't on the table for me," she commented, "I now see that I've missed out on a lot of stuff." She reached for Mary's hands, shifting slightly on her couch, and Mary's expression was one of utter confusion.
"You didn't go to college? How come?" Mary tilted her head, brows furrowed in concern, and Mai just sighed and looked away, too embarrassed to be saying this out loud to look at Mary's face.
"My grandfather insisted I should go to college, but I was keen on mastering the Shiranui-ryuu Ninjutsu not only because I'm the only heir of the can, but—" she took a deep breath, her cheeks getting rosy, "—I wanted Andy to recognize me and respect me because of my talent. But I guess that never worked out, huh?" Mai said, regret dripping from her tongue. Saying this before would've made her puff her chest with pride, but now, she realized just how stupid she'd been by centering her life around a man that didn't reciprocate her feelings.
Mary let out a long suffering sigh, pulling Mai closer, tighter, and Mai allowed herself to wrap her arms around her, melting into her chest.
"Fuck Andy, honestly," Mary said, and Mai snorted, gazing at Mary with a bored look.
"Girl, I've tried."
A raucous laugh pierced through the otherwise silent apartment, and what started as an innocent joke turned into complaints about their soon to be exes once the laughter died down.
"So..." Mary started, a doubtful tone creeping on her voice. Mai cocked a brow.
"So?" Mai prompted her to go on, reaching for her hands and giving them a squeeze.
"Are we, like, a thing now?" She asked, with her voice full of a mix of fear and excitement. She'd asked Terry this exact same question countless times before, on the nights where her common sense kicked in and told her this relationship wasn't going to go any further, when she longed for something more than sharing an apartment with a man that said he didn't like labels that lived off doing odd jobs. Sometimes, she'd wonder why it even seemed like a good idea to accept this labelless relationship in the first place.
Fortunately for Mary's nerves, Mai had cupped Mary's cheeks with her hand in a loving gesture, caressing it with her thumb as she stared into her eyes before saying: "We are, Mary, we're girlfriends."
If Mai later says that Mary cried a little, Mary will say she doesn't have any proof of this.