AU!
Started off as a drabble, then became too long to be one :s
This is my attempt to take something cliche and add an original twist to it (or at least, I sincerely hope and pray that it's original and not cliche as well :s)
Inspiration for this OneShot partially comes from something in the movie "The Conjuring", even though this OneShot is NOT horror, or even remotely related to the film at all. I'm just weird this way, because apparently even horror movies make me think of ArHi. Hehe. Perhaps any of you guys who've seen the movie can recognise just which bit inspired me here :)
ArHi OneShot |Only Playing|
In retrospect, perhaps she ought to have mentioned that they should have limited the game to his bedroom.
"Ouch," she muttered grouchily to herself as her toe made contact with yet another piece of furniture she had not estimated would be this close. Grumbling to herself, Khushi felt about for the edge of what she thought was a cabinet, clasping it with both hands and guiding herself forward along its length, belatedly cursing her lack of foresight.
"Aarav?" she called out hopefully, then fell silent to listen intently. For a five-year old, he had managed to tie the blindfold about her eyes quite securely, and it pressed against her eyelids as she strained her ears to pick up any sound that might give him away- a childish snigger, the thuds of moving furniture, the swish of curtains.
But evidently, the boy was an expert at hide-and-seek, because she could not hear a squeak from him.
She sighed, momentarily coming to a stop when she remembered the stairs were only a few feet away from the cabinet she assumed she was standing at.
She should not have agreed to using blindfolds in the first place.
And she could not even take it off, because Aarav had, with enough severity to do his grandmother proud, made her "pinky-promise" not to cheat.
That was before he had thrown her the most devious grin she had ever seen on the face of a child, before running full-tilt out of the room and to his hiding-place.
And now Khushi was marooned along the passageway, hanging on to a cabinet for dear life, and not prepared to crack her skull by tripping down the stairs, no matter how much she loved Aarav.
"Aarav, if you're listening, I give up!" she called out as loudly as she could, chewing down the mild burst of humiliation and telling herself she deserved it anyway, for giving in to his demands in the first place, "You win!"
No answer. No victory whoop, no clapping, no high-pitched giggles or gloating.
And Khushi was just about to rip the blindfold off (because she had after all conceded defeat), when she heard movement close by.
"Aha!" she exclaimed, and threw out her arms in the direction of the noise, a flash of child-like triumph making her grin broadly as her fingers hooked onto fabric, "Got-"
But then the rest of her words were swallowed up by a squeal, because hands that were much too large and much too calloused to belong to a child had locked about her wrist, and before she could let out another yelp, she had been forcibly yanked off somewhere.
As for where, with her terrible sense of direction she could not really tell.
But that was not the issue here.
The issue was the fact that the Raizadas were not at home. And that they had called her in, as their neighbour and daughter of their family friends, to babysit Aarav.
In other words, apart from Aarav and herself...
There wasn't supposed to be anyone else in the house.
Panic, blinding, electrifying, downright deadly panic, exploded its way through her.
Where was Aarav?
Was he safe?
Did this guy get him too?
Was that why he wasn't answering?
If anything happened to him-
Without the reassurance of her sight to tell her what was going on, and with her wrists trapped in an unrelenting grip that wouldn't release despite her struggles, all that damaging, crippling fear manifested itself into the only defence she could use.
A scream.
She opened her mouth, prepared to let her lungs shred with the loudest screech she could muster-
-only to have something stuffed into her mouth, both her hands pinned to her sides, her back flat against an unknown wall.
She choked.
She spluttered.
She almost spat it out, mind conjuring up multiple lists of poison and drugs, and even darker consequences of their use- when she recognised the taste of the thing melting on her tongue.
Chocolate?!
And that was when she started to notice other details.
Like the somewhat musky scent hanging in the air about her.
Like the quiet, silent sniggers issuing from somewhere a foot away from her.
Like the raspberry-cream centre of the chocolate dribbling into her mouth.
Her favourite flavour.
Her scream was instantly transformed into a growl so menacing, it sounded lethal enough to kill.
"You. Little. Douchebag."
The silent sniggers gained volume until her captor was openly chuckling. His grip around her hands loosened, and one relinquished her wrist completely- a beat later, her blindfold was slipping off, sliding down her nose to fall about her neck as she blinked furiously, fighting the twinge as her eyes adjusted to the light.
But even near-blindness did not stop her from fixing aforementioned douchebag with the deadliest glare she had in her arsenal.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" she asked him icily. In the face of his obvious amusement, there was no way she was about to reveal just how shaken she was- her heart-rate was still chaotic and disorderly, the sweat that had broken out against her back cold, and the relief to find that none of the morbid possibilities that had registered in her brain would play out almost made her knees give out.
Unfortunately (whether for herself or for him, it was hard to say), her sight had cleared enough for her to see clearly the cheeky grin with which he was regarding her.
"I was only playing," he sing-songed, mischief bright in his eyes.
Khushi promptly and forcefully stepped on his foot.
She also wondered why she had not thought to do that when she had been assaulted in the first place.
Which reminded her-
"Playing? Playing?" she spat at him, thoroughly ignoring his whimper of pain and the pitiful pout he flashed at her afterwards. He was lucky she was not pummelling him into the ground with every pro-wrestling move he had ever bored her to death with anyway- heaven help her, but all the tension he'd forced her to endure needed an outlet. "How old do you think you are?! First year in university, and you're still acting as old as your nephew!"
Which in turn reminded her-
Momentarily diverted, she asked urgently, "Where's Aarav?"
Arnav shrugged, and was immediately whacked across the arm by Khushi's free hand.
"Ow! Jesus, woman, it was just a joke, are you planning to murder me?"
"I might as well, since you're antics nearly gave me a heart-attack!" Khushi bellowed, aiming another blow at him.
But Arnav had apparently learnt his lesson and managed to dodge this one.
"OK, OK, I'm sorry!" he tightened his hold on her wrist and snagged her back when she attempted to storm off, lunging out of the way of another aggrieved punch targeting his face, "I'm sorry! I thought it would be funny-"
"You have a lousy sense of humour!"
"And I only wanted to surprise you-"
"By making me think some stranger had broken into the house, done something to your nephew, and had caught me to do lord-knows-what-that-I-don't-even-want-think-about? Oh, how nice."
Arnav grimaced a bit at the overdose of sarcasm in that last part, and had the grace to look sheepish.
"OK, when you put it like that, perhaps that wasn't the smartest idea," he wrenched Khushi back with both hands when she attempted to free herself again, before adding quickly and loudly, "But I honestly just wanted to surprise you! Mum called and said you'd be home, and I ended work quickly today, and I have the spare key, so I thought-"
And then he was rubbing the back of his head, looking awkward, confused and apologetic all at the same time, and Khushi could only stare at him as her ire trickled steadily out of her system, and then she was just exhausted to feel anything anymore.
"You little douchebag," she mumbled, but without any sting, "Why didn't you just tell me it was you, instead of freaking the living daylights out of me?"
Something tweaked in his expression, and the unexpected glint in his eye abruptly made her wary.
"I couldn't give you the chocolate if I did," he stated matter-of-factly.
Khushi frowned at him, her mouth partially open to let him know that that made absolutely no sense, when something occurred to her.
She glanced down.
One of his hands were still cuffed about her wrist.
And when Captain Idiot had struck, she was pretty sure he had restrained both her hands...
...with both of his.
Then how did the chocolate-
Several things happened at once.
The impossible posed itself as a possibility in her head.
Her eyes inadvertently flitted to his mouth.
His mouth in turn curved into a grin.
And in her currently frazzled state, she might totally have imagined it-
-but there appeared to be a smudge of something that looked like chocolate at the corner of his mouth.
And then she had all but charged out of the room- his room it turned out- as if the hounds of hell were at her feet, squeaking in a high-pitched voice she would never admit belonged to her,
"I'm going to look for Aarav now!"
And once she found his hiding-spot, she swore, the decadent sweetness of cocoa rich in her mouth and not likely to fade out anytime soon, she was going to hole herself in there and not come out again for the rest of her life.
I'd love to hear your thoughts about this!
I reserve all rights over this work of fiction and request readers do not reproduce/copy/modify it elsewhere and/or claim credit.
Cricket
Kumkum Bhagya
Tum Se Tum Tak
Sampoorna
Jhanak
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