Chapter 6: The Midnight Duel
She seemed both at peace and extraordinarily sad, somehow at the same time. A girl lay on the sidewalk at his feet, of all things. She couldn’t have been younger than sixteen or older than twenty-five—old enough to have at least a fleeting knowledge of societal norms and young enough to still have the majority of her marbles. This assumed, of course, that she had any marbles to begin with.
Despite the possibility she might not be playing with a full deck, he couldn’t deny, as his eyes scanned the length of her body, the cards she did have were lovely. Her raven black hair fell in gentle waves about her heart-shaped face and across her slim neck. Dark, lush black lashes lay perched upon her flushed cheeks like the silken wings of a resting butterfly. What captivated him most about this creature, however, were her delicate, rounded lips, parted as if in a perpetual sigh.
Squatting at her side, he hesitated a moment, debating on whether or not to wake her, before he gently tapped her shoulder with a single finger. In response she flinched in her sleep and wriggled her nose, a tiny, incomprehensible noise falling in protest from her lips. At this, his heart flipped a somersault in his chest and he couldn’t keep a smile from suddenly leaping to his face. She was precious when asleep, potentially crazy though she may have been.
As she settled once more, he hesitated again to wake her, but his conscience would not allow him to leave even a crazy girl to sleep on cold concrete. He laid, this time, his full hand on her shoulder and rocked her gently, persistently, until she began to stir. Her eyelids parted and she blinked quickly several times, gathering whatever senses she may have.
Very suddenly and in a matter of seconds, her eyes took in the shadow of his hunched form cast over her body by the moon, she felt the hand warm on her shoulder, and bolted immediately upright. Their heads collided like the crack of metal against stone and he toppled backward, arms flailing as if he might flap, sprout wings and fly away like a spooked bird.
Sayaka tore her shoe off and jumped to her feet, brandishing the footwear at him like a knife. “Pervert!” She thrust the heel of her shoe in his direction-- where e lay sprawled on his back across the sidewalk, which occurred to him was an amusing, ironic turn of events-- both eyebrows raised high on her forehead. “I dare you to try something. I just dare you.”
He gawked, open-mouthed, as she waved the heel at him in as threatening a manner as she could possibly muster. “Me? ME? I wasn’t the one asleep on the sidewalk!” He side-glanced at his watch, smirked, and added “At 12:36 AM, no less. Frankly, it seemed a bit suspect to me. And now that I find myself threatened with death by heel, I can see quite clearly how correct my suspicions were.” He pushed himself up onto his feet, and looking down from his full height, realized at once how tiny this strange girl actually was. Her head couldn't possibly have come to much higher than his armpits, if even that.
Sayaka paused mid-wave of heel, her arm frozen in the air. A look of honest consideration of what he’d just said flew across her face for a fraction of a second before her eyes narrowed and she jutted the heel at him again. “And you? What are
you doing wandering the streets at this time of night?” She tilted her head to the side and raised a single brow in question.
“I think that much is obvious by now.” He said simply, shrugging his shoulders non-committally. “I’m going about waking up crazy women that sleep on the sidewalk.”
Her jaw fell open and she stared at him in appalled silence. Snapping her mouth closed at last, a cloud was suddenly blown across her face, transforming the expression in her eyes from one of alarm, outrage, and distrust to one of heart-broken resignation. “I’m not crazy.”
Seeing this sudden sadness sweep across her face, he felt something deep inside his heart twist into knot after knot, tangling in a complication of feelings a complete and total stranger had somehow created within him. Stepping forward tentatively, he looked into her eyes and smiled kindly. “Well… maybe you could prove it if you’d stop pointing that admittedly concerning heel at me and let me put you in a taxi home for the night?”
“Oh…” She brought the heel finally at bay at her side and he could see the defenses in her eyes begin to crumble. “That seems fair. Except,” she gestured over her shoulder at the house next door and grimaced, “I live right there.” An embarrassed flush rose in her cheeks, but she shrugged it off, unwilling to appear vulnerable in front of a stranger that had yet to entirely prove he was not, in fact, a pervert
He starred at her incredulously, as if she might sprout a second head or spontaneously clone herself. “You live right there and you couldn’t walk the last two or three feet to your own bed?”
Sayaka glanced over her shoulder, her eyes falling with longing upon the house she had been found asleep in front of, and shook her head slowly. “No… I couldn’t.”
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Oh my goodness, I'm so tired. It's 2 AM and I just finished writing this. Yeah, leave it to me to stay up late writing fanfic on a friday night.
But to be fair, I'm currently stuck in the middle of nowhere without a car or public transportation. What else was I going to do? Go outside and howl at the moon?
So, this was a lot of fun to write. I enjoyed it.
I hope you like this chapter as much as I liked writing it, too.
I LOVE Pointy Heel Brandishing Sayaka.
Topic: Happily Ever After (8 Chapters) (Read 43738 times)