LOOK AT THIS AMAZING SPEED.

Months and months of not updating, and now this?

If only the quality of the writing was not so terrible. XD

This drabble is one I pulled off the computer. It was originally meant for 30kisses and an entire road trip series, but I bogged down (in typical liahime style!) after two or three.

So here it is.

-a very rusty liahime.

look over here.

"Let's go down that road. I'm going to turn left, okay?"

"Nagano is the other way. Stop being stupid and follow the map, Akiyama."

"Look over there! The world's biggest pumpkin is just thirty miles away! Why can't you be more impulsive, Ruki? You're missing all the good things in life. Seize the day and kiss it!"

The weather channel drones they lurch over a bump in the old road. The static-smothered voice seems to creep into her tired, grumpy brain and roots itself into her headache, bouncing back and forth in endless echoes of the weather in Nagoya, in Tokyo, in every forsaken corner of the world except for where the stupid car is.

That makes sense, she decides. We're in the middle of nowhere.

"Only idiots like you go to every stupid tourist trap they see," She unfolds the papers she brought with her. "Look over here, okay?" Her finger traces a thin line on the map. "Your road takes us to a landfill. We have to pick Jenrya up at the airport today, Ryou. There isn't enough time to go to every garden vegetable on the side of the road."

"Don't you want to see one of your relatives, pumpkin?"

She glares at him and stares at the map.

Ryou drives past the exit with a last longing glance, sticking with the planned line. "Ruki, are you carsick?"

"I'm not carsick, just Akiyama sick," she snaps, and rolls down her window. Ruki stares out of it, breathing in the cold early morning air streaming in from the countryside, trying to get rid of the headache that always manages to come up when she's on these crazy road trips in the middle of nowhere. The wind blows through her hair, trying to pull it out of the tight hair tie keeping it in place.

"Try looking at the horizon." he says, playing with the radio. "That might help."

"It's just a bunch of rice fields. " she says, determined not to be helped in any way, not when her stomach is scraping her backbone and this stupid metal monstrosity of Akiyama's is bumping over every pebble in the gravel road, shaking her headache to a fever pitch.

"Look over there," he says, moving her hand up to point at the streaked gray sky, "see the clouds? Rain's coming."

"So?" she grumbles and rolls her window down further, leaning her head on the taut curve of the seatbelt until her ear kisses the frame of the car. "It's just some water vapor and a bunch of plants. I don't know why I came in the first place."

But Ruki's eyes remain on the horizon.