Ashy-note Random. For Yuna, Ria, Abby, Czarina, Jerr, and all the other Love Story Chatmates I have. (:

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Scaled

The story was relatively easy to remember.

He meets her, and at once he finds himself enchanted. Her air, the easy way in which she handles herself, and yet the strong, ironically intimidating aura that wrapped itself neatly around her like a glove… they were like his own version of gravity.

She pulled him to her, and as the laws of Physics so adamantly dictate, gravity goes first.

He dove into her like a man left in the desert would into a pond.

Sooner or later, however, he found out that she wasn't one for those kinds of things. She was a free spirit. She could never be tied down. That, and she was hovered upon by so many looming predators, most of whom were bigger and better than him.

The realization struck hard when he confessed and she turned him down.

"No, Shiki."

Those words flew right past his chest.

After then, he always thought she was the kind of person you could only admire from afar.

One night, he fell into contemplation of something his blonde senior bugged him about just a few hours prior. Narumi had always asked him about his staying away from her.

"Honestly, Shiki, I don't see how you think you don't stand a chance. Aside from us, you're the only other person who knows her inside out." His senpai smiles languidly at him and flexes his legs; they were seated under a Sakura tree. Narumi was skipping classes; he was just… skipping classes too. "I gotta admit, sometimes I'm even jealous of you."

He stops reading his book for a moment and turns to look at his senior incredulously. "How could you be jealous of me when you people are the one who stick to her like warts?"

His companion laughs. "Yeah, and you don't sleep beside her when she happens to drop dead in your room."

"I don't," he answers back.

"No, you don't," Narumi laughs, "but she makes you sleep beside her because she asks you to hug her and keep her warm."

That part was true; he could see no point in lying to deny it, so he just let it pass.

"Not all of us get to know that side of her," Narumi muses still. "Any one of us would give anything to hold her like that."

"Stop," he cuts through his senpai's words. "Stop it. You… you people don't understand."

"Oh?" His elegant eyebrows were raised, more out of query than of disbelief and mockery. "What don't we understand?"

Then Narumi stops and falls into a silence that clearly meant, Explain your words, Shiki.

He huffs a breath deeply and massages the bridge of his nose. How was he to explain it? He didn't know how to say it in a way that would make things clear… What could he tell his senior? That they weren't possible? That she didn't see him as anything at all? Right. Narumi might hit him for that, and call him an arrogant piece of shit for gloating sarcastically, because to bystanders, things appeared different.

So instead of answering, he opted to flee.

What could he have done? He didn't know how to tell them without hurting himself tenfold, because everytime he says it out loud, the deeper the reality is buried into his head.

Not that it mattered, really, when it was practically carved in the insides and outsides of his skull already.

They were too far apart.

All too simple, but Narumi would never understand.

Because no, he wasn't separated from her by any means physical. In fact, he was always with her. He had always been by her side, watching, staring…

They grew up together in the Academy. She was always there.

Or rather, he was always there. She never noticed, but he was.

And he watched her progress; he's memorized her smiles, the lines on her face, the arch of her eyebrow, the shade of her lips… and practically every other little thing about her. They slept on the same bed, stayed together in classes when they happened to be classmates, ate lunch under the same tree, drank from the same glass…

Truth be told, they were almost inseparable.

He sighs and looks out his bedroom window, into the sky littered with flashing dots of light.

He remembered a conversation with Yuka once, when he asked her the possible distance of Sirius from the Earth.

"Well," she began, "stars are light-years away. So… basically if we do things right, we might be able to get no more than a three-light-year estimate."

"But it's so close. Or at least it appears to be so close."

She smiled serenely. "Yes, it does, doesn't it? But I can show a way to make it closer."

"Really?"

She laughs gaily and dances around to grab pen and paper and began drawing a crude circle. "This is Earth," she mumbled. Taking a ruler and measuring three centimeters away from the outline of the shape, she plotted a small dot. "And this is Sirius. Scaled on a ratio of one centimeter to a light-year."

She flashed him a smile and he rolled his eyes. "See? It's so close but it's so far," she mumbled. "And I'm good."

"Right."

As he recalls the moment, he looks out his window and sees the exact same star and thinks of how fitting the star's analogy is to him and Yuka.

Narumi's words were crashing over him repeatedly, like waves on shore.

"I don't see how you think you don't stand a chance."

"…Sometimes I'm even jealous of you."

"Any one of us would give anything to hold her like that."

The headache caused by too much thinking defeated him, and he fell sprawled in bed, thoughts still spinning around and around. He curses, and hits the mattress with his fists. The springs underneath him creak, and the bed was suddenly permanently lopsided.

Another curse.

Everything was so damn hard. Why was everything so fucking hard?

Whoever invented the word "easy" was, in his opinion, definitely someone who deserves capital punishment.

Because nothing was easy.

And to him, everything was harder than usual.

It was hard enough that he couldn't get out after diving into her. Hard enough that he couldn't shake off the longing for her. Hard enough that he had so many people as competition. Hard enough that each second put them all closer to separation. Hard enough that she didn't see him the way he did her.

He lifts his dizzy head and his eyes fall upon the same star.

It was the hardest part. And the hardest part of it all was that no matter how hard he tried, he could never have her. He wasn't even close.

"Scaled on a ratio of one centimeter to a light-year."

Lucky star, then, he thinks to himself. He rolls over and buries his face in the pillows.

They still smell like her.

He breathes in.

Lucky star indeed.

Because when it came to them, there was a different scale: a ratio of one centimeter to a trillion light-years.

I'm not particularly in the right mind, writing this fic… sorry if it isn't half as good as you think. XD

~Ash | pV.