whoops, missed 700 because I was catching up on the while-i-was-sleeping happenings. And then there was the magic of Illegally dead… So, lets see what I will post this time…
Oh I know. that Mamoru & Usagi piece that was pissing me off all week. Finally managed to finish it. S’probably the longest one yet.
——- prompt: WEEKS ——-
She is camped out at a table in the Market Square Cafeteria, and he is a Med Student. While she may have been willingly been tempting fate, it still comes as a shock when Mamoru sits down across from her. It’s been five weeks (3 days, 6 hours, 12 minutes, but she’s not counting) since the last time she saw him, and Usagi isn’t entirely sure of what to say or do. Her notes and textbooks are spread out all over the table, but the twisting in her stomach makes it impossible to concentrate on them.
“Usako…”
She refuses to life her head. Instead, she lets the fall of her hair cover her face; she’s had it in pigtails for so long that she had almost forgotten that she could even do that. It may be silly, but having that thin barrier between the two of them does so much for settling her nerves. She takes a deep breath… and then another… and then she does her best to focus on her schoolwork.
Usagi has never been the most dedicated student, but if it helps her to ignore Mamoru then she’s damn well going to give it a shot.
“Usako. Look at me.” That voice… she almost almost looks up. Aside from Brady and a handful of calls home, she hasn’t heard anyone speak Japanese in a month and a half. It’s just another painful reminder that she came to this country for this man, and now it’s all in pieces. She has to bite her lip not to give in and just look at him.
It doesn’t help. Mamoru leans forwards and cups her chin to lift her face. Her heart gives a painful lurch at her first true glimpse of him in months. This man is so beautiful, and she has loved him for so long; but he has hurt her so deeply too many times and she doesn’t think that she can handle it again.
His eyes thought… those beautiful eyes she has spent hours staring into are filled with pain and bewilderment, and she can’t handle that either. The honest confusion in his face as he searches hers for answers that her silence doesn’t provide. His hand slips from her face then, his fingers tangling in her hair.
He can see a pink tinge in the hair around her face, and for the first time ever he can actually see the dark roots of her hair. There is a moment of guilt as he realizes that he’s never actually questioned her hair color. He had always just assumed that it was some sort of magic hold over from Serenity, and before they’d discovered their history together he hadn’t known her well enough to care.
There is a note in his voice that almost shatters her heart all over again when he finally breaks the tense silence that has fallen between them. “Usako… why didn’t you tell me?”
The question shouldn’t baffle her the way it does, and she can’t help that it slips out: “Tell you what?”
“About this! About being here!” and he gestures widely: to their surroundings, to the cafeteria, to Stanford and Palo Alto and California and the States in general she thinks. “You’ve obviously been here since the start of the semester. Why are you avoiding me?”
The laughter that bursts out at that is just a shade off of hysterical and entirely bitter. “Really? Really? Mamoch… Mamoru, I did go to see you.”
There’s a sharp stab of pain in his heart, ragged and painful with the use of his full name. He has been ‘Mamochan’ for so long that hearing her say it just feels wrong. It feels as though that something between them has cracked and broken; feels as though he needs to fix everything now before it breaks any further. The problem is that he doesn’t know what it is that needs to be fixed, and all he can do is stare at her.
Usagi lets the highlighter she’s holding fall to the table and the clatter it makes sounds so terribly loud in the tense silence around them. After what feels like an eternity, she breaks his gaze and lets out a shuddering breath.
“I went to see you,” she repeats, her voice soft and ragged and just so broken that his heart clenches in sympathy. God knows just how much he loves this woman, and seeing her in this much pain only inspires it in himself. That it is he who apparently caused this agony, that has caused her to stew in her doubts and worries instead of coming to see him, only causes him more pain.
The girl that he had left in Tokyo would have been up in his face, wailing and begging like a child. The woman in front of him now looks just as wreaked as that girl would be, but she isn’t advertising it. There is no great temper tantrums and sobs, nothing outwards that shows her heart break anywhere near as much as her eyes. She’s grown up somewhere along the way; she’s had five weeks to work through this agony and yet he’s only known that she was even in California for one.
“You were busy,” and the words are bitten out, all sharp and harsh and in English and it makes Mamoru start. Intellectually, he knows that she knew English in order to come to Stanford, but it’s just another unexpected change between the girl he loved and this woman that he doesn’t know. “with your ‘lab partner’.”
And suddenly Mamoru knows exactly what she’s talking about. It’s hard not to when the memory is seared into his brain. He’s always subscribed to the idea that it wasn’t cheating if it was just fantasies. Especially if the girls had the ‘Serenity’ look to them: long blond hair, wide blue eyes, slim and athletically beautiful… in that case, it was just that he missed Usagi, that was all. But Michelle… Michelle didn’t fit into the blond and blue eyed mold.
She was a lot closer to Ami, actually, and he’d fallen into the trap of treating her like one of the girls because of it. They had always ignored any harmless flirting, knowing just how serious about Usagi he actually was. They knew how muich he loved his Princess, and they never thought of his flirting as an invitation.
Michelle’s kiss had been hot and heavy and needy and it had stunned im immobile for a couple minutes. Eventually he had managed to pull his brain together enough to push her off, but apparently the damage had already been done.
Mamoru leans forwards, clasping her hand between his and continuing the conversation in Japanese. He had to make sure that she understood. “Usako… she kissed me. It was… a misunderstanding on her part.”
And for a glorious moment, her eyes spark with light and love and hope. For a moment… and then the sadness slips back into them. She withdraws her hand from his with a heavy sigh. “Oh Mamoru…” and there’s that pain again, that wrongness. “Mamoru, I love you. I love you more than anything else ever, but…”
“But?”
“…these last few weeks? They’ve been hard, Mamoru. Really hard.”
“There’s no reason for it to stay that way,” he finds himself saying, and isn’t that a flip? It’s always been her chasing after him, and now that she’s taking a step back, he finds he can’t just let her go. She’s tangled herself too deeply into his heart.
She smiles so sadly at him, and there is a strange look in her eyes. “They may have been hard, but Mamoru! This is the first time in five years that I haven’t defined myself by what she was! I’m not Serenity. I’m no Moon. I’m finally finding out who I am.”
Mamoru closes his eyes. He understand the desire, and he can’t begrudge her for it. Not when he remembers the shift in perspective that had come the first time he stepped onto campus. It takes everything in him to put any sort of emotional distance between them, to understand what she’s going through. It’s harder than when he had lied to her when Chibi-Usa had first come to them.
“I’ll wait,” he says, getting up from the table. “As long as I have to. I love you, Usako.”
He can hear the sobs start as he walks away, and all he wants to do is to run back to her and fold her in his arms. He wants to brush away all the pain and agony and tears.
But he doesn’t. She’s had five weeks to start to learn herself. A few more won’t hurt. She needs to learn that her tears won’t get her everything.
He knows he’s lying to himself.