ArHi FF! Gravity - Thread 1 - [Completed] - Page 101

Chapter 21: Old friend and dark truth

"How the hell did you find me?" Akash looked flabbergasted as soon as Khushi's face came into view.

"You know how good I am in finding out about things," Khushi smiled sardonically and barged inside his house without waiting for a response. She looked around the house and noted that though the apartment was quite small but it was tastefully decorated. Akash's talent was screaming from every wall and all the things that adorned on the walls and floors of the house. Tasteful yet not very bashful about - that was Akash's signature.

"What are you doing here?" Akash asked bleakly. Khushi, who was inspecting the apartment, ignored the question.

"You don't mind if I look around a bit, do you? I may not like you very much at this moment but I do like what you have done with the place." She continued her observation. Akash knew that she was stalling and was calming her nerves till she came to a calming place.

"May I?" She asked her palm clutching the knob on his bedroom door. She respected his privacy and didn't want to intrude further. Akash hesitated for a half a moment. "You don't want me to?" Khushi said turning around and retreated her hand.

"No'it's alright, go ahead," Akash said defeated. It wasn't as if she doesn't know about what he felt for her only that her rejection was delivered with so much conviction and certainty that he had reeled in its poisonous embrace for months. 'I don't think I'll ever love you. You are a great friend and a greater human being', she had said.

He was shaken back into consciousness when he saw Khushi stumble out of his bedroom with wide eyes. She looked at him sharply and he simply smiled mirthlessly.

"It's my private haven Khushi. You have no right to judge," he said lazily. Khushi pursed her lips and peered at her friend carefully. He hadn't changed a bit in seven years. He still wore loose t-shirts and worn out jeans, spectacles perched primly on his nose. She didn't understand why he always wore flip-flops as against any other form of footwear. No amount of badgering had made him budge on this subject.

"You have a huge photo of me in your room Akash and you think I don't have a right to judge?" She hissed violently. "How can you?"

"How can I what, Khushi? Have your photo in my room? Would you rather be pleased had I displayed in living room because I can do that just fine." He wasn't being purposefully cruel but merely giving an alternate perspective of what she would definitely not like.

"Why didn't you put it up in the living room?" Khushi asked contradicting her initial thoughts. Akash reeled back in surprise having not expected such a retort from a relatively conservative Khushi. Things looked like had changed a very great deal.

"I would proudly display to the world what you mean to me Khushi but I didn't want to insult you in the process of doing so. The photo in my room is of you when we were in college and I want to hold on to that idea, that notion of you which I fell in love with. The Khushi in my living room would just be a photo of my married best friend," he said bitterly, poetically. Khushi leaned on the wall and looked at her best friend from college. He had no idea!

Before she could formulate a response, he weeded out the thing that was bothering him since he saw her face on the other side of the door. "Why are you here Khushi?" He asked softly, almost pleading her to let him return to the life he had created without her.

"I came here to ask you why you weren't present on my wedding day Akash." She whispered.

Akash laughed bitterly. "You spent too much effort in finding me and traveling all the way to Varanasi just to ask me this question?" His voice garbled as if something was stuck in crevices of his mouth and he was having difficulty in formulating the words. "That's cruel." He whimpered.

She ignored his hurt, his bitterness and the affection he carried for her. For now, he needed to hear the truth. She slid down the wall and sat on the floor, her palms resting on cool mosaic. "I thought I had planned everything to perfection." She said. Akash sat leaning on wall opposite to hers and.

"You promised me to come to my wedding and everything was riding on that promise, you know? You didn't like Arnav just because I liked him and I humored that fallacy all along; I always knew though you made excuses not to make your appreciation obvious. I knew that when the bride wouldn't be found anywhere, you would go to Arnav and tell him what was going on. I trusted you to use your judgment in case I took any...drastic steps but...you weren't there. I hadn't anticipated that."

"Wait, what?" Akash stammered. "You ran away from your wedding?"

"I did. It was too-"

Akash cut her off. "Dumb, Khushi. It was too dumb to destroy that has been built by more than one person." His voice was harsh and she didn't blame him for that.

"I wasn't thinking straight and I just fled." Her voice was barely above whisper. "I didn't know what else to do Akash," she broke when he looked at her in disbelief.

"Why didn't you tell Arnav? I am sure he could have done something about it," he tried to reason with her.

"Don't you remember the promise I made to Anjali? That I would never tell anything to Arnav unless I have complete proof?" She cried out.

"I don't understand why you have to be so faithful for a promise Khushi and that too in this day and age. I understand that you respect promises you made or were made to you but reality isn't like that; reality is bitchy and doesn't care a f**k about promises as everything one does is for survival and maintaining sanity." Akash bit out scathingly. "You are a contradiction to your own pragmatic personality Khushi. Sometimes I don't understand you at all."

"That's because you never did," she said harshly. Akash looked at her as if someone had physically punched him in gut and the pain was evident on his face. "Single truth can change people irrevocably Akash. And I had to deal with one too many." She reasoned, seeing how she had hurt him with her words just then. "I prioritized something I shouldn't have. I believed someone who I shouldn't have. I trusted someone I shouldn't have." Her voice was choked.

"I believed, always did, in myself when I shouldn't have." She bit her lips in effort to control the sob that was desperately trying to escape. "Do you know what it is to live without believing in anything Akash?" He assumed the question was rhetoric as he looked at her. "Hell would be a paradise compared to that." He didn't argue with that because he knew exactly what she was talking about. He was a living example of that.

"You could have told someone - anyone Khushi." He said softly.

"I did tell someone; I told you." Her voice was void of any emotions and Akash felt his heart wrenching all over again. Yes, she had told him hoping that he would be there to save the day but he wasn't. He was several hundred kilometers away drowning in his own misery of not getting the girl he wanted.

"I didn't have enough evidence back then to tell others that there was a possibility that I was in love with my own brother. I know it isn't the case now but back then, I believed it was the truth!"

There was no energy left in her and the harsh truth that consumed her sanity seemed to consume the room in which they were in, in its dark shadow.

Next Chapter: Interlude [III] Cosmic Limbo

This may be anti-climatic and a bit cliched, but it was an idea I always wanted to explore. So there it is.

I pride myself in being clinically detached from what I write, but this story got to me and frankly, I don't like it :=) I decided to pull off from this story completely and just stop writing but I couldn't. I don't think I can stop writing this even if I want to anymore. I have to see this story evolve to its completion.

Hang in there everyone, only TWO days to weekend!!!