The gun powder meets her nostrils boldly, but the smell has grown too familiar to matter any longer. A part of that realization makes her sad, the other part of her (the insane one) strangely glad.
He sits at the desk, typing. Not too fast, not too slow; and somehow his fingers press in at the perfect crevices between moments. The letters are perfectly executed—just like his gun-shots, she thinks. The TV plays out behind her in fuzzily animated schemes and gaudily dressed characters. (She loves them overdone—she knows it's shameful, but still.)
The voices are muted now, registering only faintly in the back of her brain. The scripted anger and unrequited love do not move her as she sits still, watching him. Blue hair rests placidly on her shoulders and she buries her chin into her arms drowsily.
"Ne, Sousuke," she says, after a while.
He pauses momentarily to look up at her, but the tapping of his fingers on the keyboard does not cease. "Hm?"
His face is too straight, she decides. So are his shoulders and legs, all the lines of his body.
She frowns. In a moment, she loses her train of thought and is rendered suddenly clumsy.
"What are you doing?" she asks instead, and wonders when and where the awkwardness had been born. She knows very well what he is doing.
Sousuke's eyes remain trained on the laptop screen, and the artificial glow spills onto his cheekbones, paling that comically serious expression.
"I'm typing up a report. Why?" he asks, and types and types and types.
She watches him ruefully. "Mm, nothing. I was just curious. You keep going."
The two lapse into silence while the TV continues to play, and Sousuke continues to type. She can tell it's a drama now by the high girly squeals that pitch every so often. She finds no interest there, and suddenly the squeals are too high and too girly for her liking, grating in her ears.
She shifts restlessly, trying to rid her head of the merciless sound. Finally, she stands and walks over to the TV, switching it off. Sousuke looks up at this with an expression of mild surprise.
"I thought you liked that show," he comments.
Kaname sits down and buries her head in her arms once again, discontent.
"I did—I mean, I do, I guess," she mumbles.
"Then why did you turn it off? It seemed to be reaching the climax."
"I—I just wasn't in the mood," she says, feeling lame and strangely irritated.
Sousuke shrugs and returns to his typing.
He types, and she watches him, peeping over the fortress of her arms, and for once she wishes he would do something about it. The sudden emptiness overtakes her, and she is startled out of her impassive state.
"Sousuke—" she looks up, eyes strangled.
Sousuke looks up at the change of tone, alert. "Chidori?"
The words freeze in her throat at his look, and the emptiness claws feverishly somewhere inside her. His look burns her, and she is afraid that—
The clamp of thick hotness filling her throat catches her by surprise, the pricking behind her eyes that is at once strange and familiar. She buries her head deeper into her arms, to this self-constructed hiding place.
(what am I hiding from? she wonders faintly)
"Chidori?" his voice again, and it frightens her how much she cares. "Chidori, what's the matter?"
She blinks hard, the hotness overwhelming and loathsome.
"I—It's nothing," she mutters, her throat aching, and the ache filling her head. The damned typing! Won't it ever stop?
She cannot bear it.
And yet she does, ironically. She forces herself to swallow the monstrous lump in her throat; but the saliva does nothing to dissolve this self-disgust, does nothing to dissolve his earnest stare, or her entangled affair. She bites her tongue silently, reprimanding herself.
"Chidori?" he quests, and there is a small alarm ringing in his voice. She shudders at the sound of it, finding suddenly all its dishonest faults. He had never really cared. She was a duty and a burden, nothing more, and all this friendship and good feeling, this thing she wanted to be—
To be—!
This thing—she'd imagined it, cultivated her own magical garden, and now that the storm of realization had struck, all the plants were withered and shrunken. She was left to stand in a garden full of ugly dead plants and growing weeds.
She swallows hard, and swallows long. It will be a while before she forgets the taste of it (if she ever does).
"Sousuke," she breathes out, still buried in the fortress. "It's nothing. I'm alright."
It's alright.
And after awhile, he begins to type again.
-
Fullmetal Panic. Yeah, I've watched it recently...and I just love awkward romance.