Title: Countdown
Day/Theme: Aug. 8 / escape all that waiting and staying
Character/Pairing: Himawari/Watanuki
A/N: Basically, I was trying out a new style and I don't think it came out very well. D:
Summary: Waiting is never easy, be it night or day or a countdown of wishes.

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...

She doesn't know how hard this might be, this meeting of theirs. Himawari counts the days, the coffee rings on her study table, the burnt bags of cookies littering the trash can.

(Twelve, eleven, ten, her fingers shake as she crosses another notch on her calendar.)

It will be the first meeting in a year.

A year-

(Tears staining her pillow, wobbly smiles, nervous handshakes. Friends, new ones coming closer and closer but not too close, never too close, not anymore. She studies and studies, her fingers making tread-marks in the paper, her eyes wearing holes in the walls. Valentine's day comes and goes and a box of chocolates remain untouched by the window-sill. Her phone idles on her table, waiting for a call that doesn't come. Snow covers the ground, her footprints hidden beneath another layer, and she wonders if there are any signs she has ever been there. Any signs that he, the boy who laughed and cooked and yelled, ever existed.)

-and so much has changed.

He's changed (with darker tones and softer laughs and who knows what else).

So has she, with her firmer steps and honey-dipped lies, and she wonders if this will not be a meeting between two friends but two strangers instead.

She spends the night before pacing, reading, running, and when Domeki appears at her door, umbrella in hand, she still isn't ready.

All she can do is grab a bag of burnt cookies and hope he'll still eat them and say they're the sweetest things he's ever bitten.

...

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