Normal

A/N: Hey, all! This is just a silly little something I wrote in-between working on crap for my classes. I'm not really sure why I thought to write this, but… well, I hope you enjoy it, nonetheless.

Just a heads-up, I do kind of use Arnold's reflections as a way to time-hop here and there. So you're aware, chunks of italicized dialogue are flashbacks to conversations that Arnold remembers. I apologize in advance for any confusion. c:

Arnold frowned at the rain's gentle susurrations against the roof of Sunset Arms, the crack in the ceiling, the Spumoni-shaped smudge on the skylight. He had been frowning at something or other for nearly twenty minutes straight, worrying at the chapped skin of his lower lip and playing with a bit of stubble beside his ear that he missed while shaving that morning.

Whenever he was deep in a funk, thinking deep thoughts and pondering all manners of existential queries, he would always be fidgety and uncomfortable in his skin. It was like being stuck in a dryer-shrunken sweater, claustrophobic and itchy.

Whenever he was in one of these moods, he'd take to asking Grandpa for advice over one of Grandma's kitchen experiments, or maybe he'd talk it out with Gerald while playing catch in the park. Things were different now, though: Gerald was busy with Phoebe, and while Grandpa would always be there for his only grandson, Arnold was growing up and out of his "Shortman" moniker.

At eighteen, Arnold greatly appreciated his grandparents' presence in his life. They were more like parents to him, after all. He had acknowledged, however, that he needed to learn to rely on himself and his peers more often than not. Soon enough, he'd be off to college and on his own. Besides, their advice erred on the… uh, eccentric side, for lack of a better word.

Bracing himself, he called out to his fellow occupier-of-space.

"Hey Helga..."

"Yeah?" the girl in question asked. She'd barely moved a muscle since they took shelter from the autumnal storm in Arnold's room, lifting a finger only to turn the pages of the latest livre du jour. Her hair, for once, fell in soft and unhindered waves down her shoulders. The warm chestnut of her locks stood in stark contrast to the deep, icy blue of her eyes, the slight tan of her skin divulging the secret of long summer days spent outdoors.

Less irrational and pensive, she was far more apt to think before she spoke and never evoked the fury of her fists unless necessary.

Arnold still couldn't get over the fact that he'd been saved from being roughed up as a freshman thanks to Helga. It wasn't that he minded being saved by a girl—in fact, he was thankful!—but being saved by your once-upon-a-time bully who suddenly sprouted breasts and curves and all sorts of interesting anatomical inheritances had been a surreal experience.

She was a completely different creature from the Helga Pataki of P.S. 118.

Arnold still remembered that fateful day in their first year of high school when he'd seen Helga again. In the most basic sense of the word, they had finally shared a class after nearly five years apart. Then, turning to do the cursory and tedious introductions during the first day of their Global Lit class, he had seen her.

Gone were her pigtails, her audacious (yet oddly endearing) pink bow, and her equally pink dress, replaced with a casual style and grace that fell somewhere in the middle of the tomboy-girly spectrum. He'd barely recognized her at the time, seeing only a vaguely familiar, pretty face that looked upon him with unsettling recognition. Then, foregoing the routine "Hi, my name is blah, I'm a freshman too and my favorite piece of literature is something I just Googled on my phone," she let the silence between them linger for just a moment longer than was customary.

Sitting back in her chair with her bare, tanned arms folded across her chest, she offered him an expression caught between amused and flustered. He remembered seeing the ghosts of henna decorating her hands and thinking they had been real tattoos at the time. In lieu of custom, all she murmured was, "Hey, Football Head."

She said no more; she didn't have to.

He had almost given himself whiplash doing a double take because there was no way this was… it couldn't be! This pleasant to the eye, subdued, and only slightly intimidating brunette couldn't have been the same girl that he recalled from his childhood, he'd thought. Differences in hair color aside, the old Helga would've perforated his eardrums with spitballs by now. She would've introduced herself with Old Betsy, shoved him out of his chair, tied his laces together while he wasn't paying attention. He knew he had been gaping at that point, but he felt justified in his shock.

"H-Helga?"

Back in the present, Helga looked up at Arnold's lack of response. Frowning, she closed her book, thumb jammed inside so she kept her place. This book had some weird gilded constellations decorating its velvety purple cover, he noted. No title or author, nothing to clue the casual observer in on what lay within its contents. "Earth to Football Head," she called without any real heat.

He shook his head, regaining his train of thought. "Sorry, I was just thinking."

"I'm pretty sure I could've figured that one out," she smirked down at him, sitting back among the comforters of the mini blanket fortress she'd made for herself on his bed. "You always get this weird look on your face when you're deep in thought. Kinda like," she paused, mimicking a ridiculous expression for effect, "Someone just told you there was no more ice cream left in the world, or your favorite band broke up. Or… something."

Arnold rolled his eyes but laughed in spite of himself. "Right."

They held each other's gaze for a long, drawn-out moment that seemed to set fire to his very veins and, judging by the barest of shivers, left Helga similarly affected. Her skin seemed to glow for a moment, her eyes turning into silvery pools of mercury before she remembered herself and, blushing, snapped her eyes back to her book.

"There's no way you can be… You're not Helga."

"And yet…"

"You've changed."

In a way so unlike the Helga he'd known, she hadn't exploded like a volcano over his slightly offensive shock. Instead, she had frowned, raising a single brow in bemusement. She gave a pointed look at his tamer hair, his lack of a hat, and his shaggy-chic sense of style. (Rhonda's affectionate words, not his.)

"And you haven't?"

Presently, he sat back, bemused. As of late, Helga was what—or rather, who—was on his mind, for good reason. He was trying his hardest to come to terms with the fact that Helga would always be his, no matter what he decided. She would always go on loving him to some extent, he knew, and it would go against her very being to be with anyone else. It wasn't fair, Arnold had argued on more than one occasion, but Helga had given him a lopsided smile and said, in that voice that made him swallow hard and breathe faster, "Life isn't fair, Football Head, but The Fates could've done a lot worse than make me fall in love with you."

Memories of their re-acquaintance in high school, intertwined with the less-than-savory ones from when they were younger, had constantly bombarded him as he tried making sense of things. When Helga had come clean to him nearly two years ago, she hadn't done so with any demands for him to return her affections. She had, in fact, seemed resigned to accepting a loving-from-afar, unrequited existence. She had told him as much, saying that she "just wanted to let him know," as if she were imparting something as mundane as the weather forecast or the answers to their algebra homework. There was no pressure on his behalf, only angst on hers, and it was slowly but surely driving him insane.

He couldn't figure her out sometimes. He had long since acknowledged that he found himself falling more and more head over heels in like with Helga, at the very least. It was happening slowly but surely the closer they grew closer together and the closer to graduation it got. It went well beyond that, too, given the lineage of said girl.

It had been an ordinary Tuesday when Helga had entrusted him with her deepest, darkest secret—bigger, even, than that one aborted declaration of love up on FTI all those years ago. He remembered how she pulled him off to the side before they parted ways, begging him to meet her after school. Their sophomore year was well underway, and they'd coincidentally shared two classes that year. She had stopped him outside of their Classics class, and he could still remember the way her voice cracked when she told him the park would be more appropriate for such a confession.

He recalled how his throat had tightened and his heart had raced at the possible implications—confession, after all, was a word that positively reeked of a life-changing seriousness that had him covertly checking his breath behind his hand as he was dragged along. Even then, he had felt the pull of her attraction, both physically and emotionally.

It had been brisk but seasonably warm that day, and he remembered sliding his windbreaker over her shoulders when she started to shiver.

He remembered as if it had been yesterday.

She pushed him down onto an isolated park bench before pacing back and forth like a crazed madwoman on the cusp of a breakthrough. The air had practically crackled around her agitated form, something that, looking back now, Arnold wondered if he had imagined. What he remembered the most about that afternoon, however, had more to do with the fact that she loved him since they were kids. Not only had she been in love with him for an overwhelming majority of her life thus far—she called it a stupid crush, but looking back, after doing some connect-the-dots and wondering how he could have survived so long being so incredibly dense, he knew better. Not only that, but it turned out there was a perfectly logical reason behind her borderline freaky, obsessive admiration for the boy she'd always been keen on tormenting.

Yeah… logical.

Finding out you were the soul mate of your grade school bully turned attractive Veela… Well, it was surreal, to put it simply. He remembered bursting out laughing after a beat, truly convinced that Helga, with her odd yet endearing sense of humor, had been trying to one-up him for accidentally spilling her tapioca pudding during lunch the other day. When she didn't laugh alongside him, instead looking close to breaking his face or bursting into tears, Arnold's amusement had died a quick and sudden death.

"Wait… you're not serious, are you? How is this possible? I-is this…"

"Is this…" He gestured between them both, startling her with the suddenness and volume of his voice. "…Normal?

Helga blinked, smile evaporating. "Normal?" she repeated, brow furrowing in irritated bewilderment. After a beat, she seemed to curl in on herself, dwarfed by her blanket-nest. "Are you talking about our… my being a…?"

Arnold sat up from his position on the floor with a frown, taken aback by the complete one-eighty in Helga's countenance. "Yeah, but not in a bad way," he quickly insisted at her increasingly ticked-off and upset moue.

"It sounds bad," she muttered, picking at a burgundy afghan's loose thread.

It would be better to nip this in the bud before Helga got too irritated, so he explained: "Is it normal for this to feel so…" He trailed off, voice lilting up at the end in question as he gestured for emphasis.

Helga's eyes had narrowed, but at least she didn't look as insulted as before. Thank god for that, Arnold thought. The last time he'd gotten on the girl's bad side, an offhand and crass remark about her affinity for sweets, he swore he'd been inches from having his eyebrows incinerated by the heat of her glare alone.

She didn't ask for further clarification from him, which was for the best. He barely knew what he was trying to say. It was something that, even with hours of thought, he lacked words to express. Helga, ever perceptive and eloquent, gave him one last searching look before nodding to herself. Arnold couldn't shake the feeling of being seen through, a clear glass whose contents were visible for the world to see.

"You want to know if what you're feeling is too much, too soon." Helga paused, more for effect than his nod in reply. She already knew, in that almost clairvoyant way she had when it came to him, that she hit the nail on the head. She looked down at her lap, fiddling with the spine of her book.

Feeling the overwhelming desire to reassure, Arnold scrambled up from the floor to her side, only to fall in a tangled heap of blanket when he realized, belatedly, that both his legs had fallen asleep. "Ouch."

Helga barked out a laugh, amused despite the tense atmosphere. "Klutz."

"You love it," he retorted as he struggled to right himself by her side.

"If you only knew," she breathed, as if she'd meant to think the words instead of saying them out loud. Arnold's eyes snapped up of their own volition to meet Helga's, and not for the first time, he felt like the tide being tugged to and fro in the simple, glowing presence of the moon: distant, but there, just a hair's breadth away from him before she inevitably pushed him back to the shore once more.

It was the allure, she had explained to him once, a sort of chemical, hormonal reaction that his presence inspired and practically intoxicated him.

"Nguh," he senselessly garbled, as if he were an overused VHS tape too tangled up to figure out. Regardless, Helga seemed to know what he meant: she gave him that besotted little smile that made his hair stand on end with electricity, reaching out to trail her fingertips along the angles of his jaw. She found the same patch of stubble he'd toyed with earlier, seemingly mesmerized as the pad of her thumb rasped over it again and again.

They had gotten closer and closer—so close, in fact, that their noses were millimeters from brushing together. He knew his eyes was so lidded he probably looked drugged, and he could hear her unsteady breathing, smell her gentle yet intoxicating perfume, count the very faint freckles decorating the bridge of her nose…

"Who wants normal?" she piped up suddenly, sounding strangled. Arnold was about to ask if she was alright, but he was beat to it by the sound of fabric tearing. Arnold's breath caught in surprise when, within seconds, they found themselves embraced by a pair of huge, lovely wings the color of silvery snow. He met Helga's eyes and dissipated the guarded insecurity lurking in her tentative smile with a soft kiss.

"Who needs normal," he agreed, pulling a laughing Helga, his crazy and obsessive yet sweet and thoughtful Veela on top of him. He felt his brooding mood sufficiently dispelled like the clouds on a bright, sunny day as he held her close.

Normal was overrated, after all.

A/N: Well, there you have it. Please review and let me know if you loved it or hated it, and if you'd like to see more from this HA! Veela!verse. Oh, and stay amazing!