Guilt
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Chapter 1: not-so-first meetings
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[chapter summary]
She shows up at his apartment the night of his twenty-fifth birthday.
[notes]
was just weeding this out of my laptop tbh the incomplete fic folder was getting a little crowded OTL
/now continued/
seo and waka, ten years on.
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She shows up at his apartment the night of his twenty-fifth birthday.
Wakamatsu's still in his work attire, and is pottering about in the kitchen while replying to all the birthday emails he's gotten from friends and family, when the doorbell rings. He hasn't the foggiest idea who it could be, visiting at this time of night. Probably just some pizza deliveryman who's stopped at the wrong unit, he thinks, opening the door with face schooled into an expression of polite rejection.
But the person at the door isn't some lost pizza deliveryman – it's Seo.
Seo-senpai.
Seo Yuzuki.
Wakamatsu blinks, blue eyes wide.
"Hey," she says, and her voice is so deadpan and casually rude and so perfectly the same as it was in high school that he feels like crying. "I'm here to sing you a birthday song."
"…Hirotaka."
He smiles wanly and lets her in, watches as she kicks her shoes off and they fall over messily next to his neatly aligned footwear, habitually stoops to shuffle them into order as well.
"Thanks for showing up," he nods carefully at her, "though this is rather a surprise…Yuzuki."
"I haven't sung for you since you graduated from high school, haven't I?" she remarks conversationally, as she rolls up the sleeves of her white shirt; his eyes travel down the seam of the pencil skirt she wears. The hem stops two inches above her knees. He'd done the same thing then, when she came over to say her farewells and give him a congratulatory pat on the head; he'd stooped to let her reach up and tousle his hair, had used that as an excuse not to look at her face directly, had trailed his eyes down the beautiful curve of her legs.
He'd actually been in a fairly good mood, because Nozaki-senpai had handed him a copy of Lorelei's latest song – one that she hadn't released online yet, even though she was getting increasingly popular as a net idol in the past two years, the two years she'd spent in college. He'd been honoured and flattered and excitedly confused, and then he'd gone and ruined everything.
This time, his eyes trace the outline of her legs as they did before, but then they're being drawn back up, as if irresistibly, towards her shoulders, her neck, her face. He panics internally, fixes his gaze on the light switch, an unopened utility bill, anything. Anything but her face, and the guilt that surfaces when she fills his vision or his thoughts. It always bubbles up gently, making it so that he has no right time to notice and clamp down on those rogue feelings.
They study each other in overtly covert fashion – sidelong glances and affected indifference are the only thing they've allowed themselves after everything went to shit. That rule still holds, even though it was years and years ago that everything went to shit. Because first cuts are the deepest after all, aren't they? Though it's been a long time since he graduated.
Since he graduated and then found out she was Lorelei, and threw a ginormous hissy fit, they both know, but they're not going to talk about it. They don't want to. No tonight, at least. She glances past him, and he remembers he has a question to answer.
"Yeah, you haven't," he agrees, and can't stop himself from tacking on the next part. It must be the wine talking, he thinks, as he watches himself shape his lips to his next words. "I missed it. I missed you."
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She swivels to pin him with her amber gaze, and he swallows, hard.
He lets her punch him in the chest, no holds barred.
She lets him wrap his arms around her tightly from behind.
And those gestures, they hope, will be more than enough to convey everything that they couldn't say, and still can't.
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[notes]
Originally written as an omake for another of my one-shots, but it got kinda off track so I made it a stand-alone chapter. Older character AU dramas - who doesn't love them? (well, not me) Now continued, after minimal encouragement from anonymous AO3 commenters xoxo
You guys please talk to me too HEY