{Alternate Universe (often abbreviated as "AU") is a descriptor used to characterize fanworks which change one or more elements of the source work's canon. Broadly, an AU may transplant a given source work's characters to a radically different setting, shift the genre in which their adventures occur, and/or alter one or more of their professions, goals, or backstories.}
.~.
‘Ah...Miss Imlie! CEO of Bhaskar Times!’
‘Ah…Mr. Aryan Singh. Freeloader of the Rathore Empire.’
‘Ouch. You are as sharp as ever.’
‘And you are as jobless.’
‘Oh, how you wound me Imaliya.’
‘I do not have time for this-’
‘Oi! Relax. Just called to say your interview was phenomenal. The camera does love you.’
‘Isn’t it like..4.30 AM where you are? Did you wake up just to watch an interview?’
‘Please, you offend me. You know I’d never sacrifice my sleep. Di had the TV on in the lounge. It was quite hard to miss.’
‘Wait what-’
‘Oh, yes. I am back in town.’
‘Why?!’
‘To annoy you, you silly girl. Don’t you know that’s the main purpose of my life?’
‘I’ll kill you Aryan Singh Rathore!’
‘Promise?’
Click. The line goes dead.
-x-
“Why the frowny face so early in the morning?” Meethi inquired after observing her beloved daughter glaring at the air in front of her continuously for the past ten minutes.
“Aryan is back in town.” Imlie replied without breaking the staring contest she had going on with…nothing.
“Oh yes, Narmada ji was quite excited about his return.”
“You knew?!” Imlie gaped at her mother. “And you didn’t tell me?”
“Imaliya, you were busy with your new project of expanding Bhaskar Times’ digital presence. You hardly had time to sit still with me let alone be caught up with social updates of our family friends. Besides, why the surprise? He was bound to return one of these days.”
“I’m not…surprised. Just baffled. I thought he had found his calling inbeing an international wanderer.” Imlie took a deep breath and lay down her head in her mother’s lap.
Meethi chuckled and gently ran her fingers through Imlie’s hair. It really had been a while since Imlie had spent time with her like this. While caressing her daughter’s hair, Meethi’s finger trailed down to the frown on Imlie’s forehead and she gave it a few taps.
“Must you be so annoyed? You are no longer a kid. How much longer will you two indulge in these childish fights?”
Imlie groaned and snuggled closer to her mother. She never hid anything from Meethi but when it came to the nuisance that was Aryan Singh Rathore in her life, she never quite had the right words to describe the gamut of emotions that resided within her; none of them pleasing.
“Can I expect you to be at least civil with him when you meet him?”
“No.” Well, Imlie could be honest about that at least.
“Imlie!” Meethi’s reprimanding tone had Imlie getting up from her mother’s lap, her mood even more turned off than it was.
“Amma! Please don’t ask me to be civil with someone whose entire life’s purpose is to annoy me. And that’s not me saying, that’s what he says. And does. Since the beginning. And you know it!”
“You know what? I do not understand your silly fights. And I don’t even want to. I don’t care what that boy does but I expect my daughter to actually act like the strong, powerful woman that she is who does not let any person rattle her. Specially if that person is an old friend.”
Imlie whined and Meethi had a rush of adoration for her daughter. Just yesterday Imlie’s interview that aired on a major TV channel had won her praises all over social media. How at such a young age she had managed to take a humble newspaper into one of the leading voices of journalism in the country. And she did all that after having gone through a major tragedy in her personal life. Clips of her interview were going viral on social media, hailing her as an inspiration for many.
And here she was now, whining because an old friend was back in town.
“He’s not my friend.” Imlie huffed. “A freeloader like him can never be my friend!”
“Imlie. He’s the heir to the Rathore Empire. ‘Freeloader’ is bit of a stretch, don’t you think?”
“The man has never worked a day in his life! He has hands softer than my belly! For all intents and purposes, he is a freeloader!” Imlie took the cushion from beside her and clutched it tightly, no doubt imagining it to be Aryan’s neck.
“Wow. Someone knows an awful lot about the softness of my hands.”
Meethi’s retort died on her lips. Imlie’s grip on the cushioned tightened.
“I’m flattered.” Aryan gave Imlie a smile that she didn’t bother return but Aryan wasn’t paying attention anyway. He had sat down by Meethi’s feet and his head was busy occupying the place where Imlie had found her peace just a few moments ago.
“Meethi Maa! Oh, how I missed you and the warmth of your lap!”
“Aru Baba! How I missed your liveliness! Your absence was felt in the silence of this house.” Meethi placed a kiss on Aryan’s head before ruffling his hair; love poured from every pore of Meethi’s body for the man who was acting like a child with the way he was reveling in all the attention.
Imlie rolled her eyes and tried her best to not let her annoyance show. Had it not been for Meethi’s warning of being civil with Aryan, the cushion in her hand would’ve already found its home on Aryan’s face. Followed by a few choice insults. The grand conclusion would’ve been him being kicked out of her house. Literally.
“What lecture have you given Miss CEO that she is so quietly controlling the murderous rage that I can feel emitting from her?” Aryan asked and Imlie almost snapped.
Almost.
“My mother has not given me any lecture Mr. Rathore. I don’t need one. I am not a child who needs constant reminders on how to behave.” Imlie replied with the world’s fakest smile on her face. Meethi cleared her throat and ignored her daughter’s blatant lie. Regardless of how much she loved Aryan, at the end of the day Meethi was firmly Team Imlie.
“Of course. My bad. How could I forget Miss Imaliya has already crossed the threshold to adulthood long ago.”
The smile disappeared from Imlie’s face and her expression turned stony. If Aryan recognized the shift in her emotions, of course he did the man was notorious for knowing her inside out, he didn’t comment on it. He turned his attention back to Meethi and resumed talking to her.
Imlie couldn’t stand the sight of Aryan so happily catching Meethi up to speed about his various adventures. Imlie suspected if she stayed there for a few more seconds, forget the cushion, she’d pick up the antique vase from the table and smash it over Aryan’s head; the irony of the vase being a gift from the Rathores was not lost on Imlie.
“Amma. I’m going to get ready and head to the office.”
“Arey! You said you were going to take a day off today.” Meethi was surprised at her daughter’s sudden change in plans. Just the day before Imlie had so excitedly shared the news that she was going to be taking a day off to laze around at home as a reward for all the hard work she had been doing for the past few months.
“Yeah, something came up. I need to go check it out myself. Don’t wait up for me.”
Imlie rushed out of there not even bothering to give Aryan a backward glance let alone say goodbye to him. If she knew him, and she knew him a good deal well, she knew the day wouldn’t be over before he came hovering around her.
Imlie’s secretary was surprised to see her back in the office on her supposed day off. But Imlie only told him to carry on with the tasks that she had already assigned him and instructed him not to let anyone disturb her. She found refuge in her office. For a while she tried to find any work that she could busy herself with but then cursed her own efficiency. There was no way any pending work was remaining waiting for her. She had made sure all her tasks were done before she took a much-earned day off. But that was before she knew Aryan was back in town. Had she known that earlier…well. Her life would’ve been a lot different than it was had she been in the position of knowing news earlier.
Being idle meant her mind took her to places she had locked behind strong doors. On any other occasion she would’ve managed to control her wandering thoughts and brought them under her control. Precise control and complete authority on her emotions. That had been tools of survival in the past few years. Just the thought of losing her control, being vulnerable again, giving anyone else the power over her to break her as per their whims had Imlie shuddering.
She took off her high heels, loosened a button of her shirt, and let down her hair. There was no way she’d have let anyone see her in the office see her in such a disheveled look but she trusted that her commands would be followed. There would be no one there to disturb her today. Well, no one on her payroll at least.
Imlie sat down on the soft and cozy sofa and rested her head on the back o fit. Staring at the ceiling, she tried to assess her gains and losses. The two columns were unequally balanced. The gains column had had more objects. But she knew if she put the gains and losses on a weighing scale, the scale with the losses would hold more weight.
It wasn’t the amount of what she had lost that had her awake at night. It was just the weight of it. Always the weight of it.
Sighing, Imlie closed her eyes and let her mind take her wherever it pleased. Years of therapy had made sure that the bad memories didn’t turn into suffocating nightmares but they still pinched like an uncomfortable sensation; like ants crawling up her skin.
The sensation was her frequent companion. She didn’t mind it giving her company.
Sleep took her under its wings before she realized. Usual flashes of bad memories plagued her sleep but they were all hazy and ran by too fast. Only one image stayed more vivid than most, overwhelming every other memory.
An image of a boy.
A disappointed look.
A shake of his head.
And the slamming of a door behind him.
Imlie woke up with a gasp. It took her a few seconds to realize where she was. The realization that she was covered with a jacket took some more seconds to hit her.
Her gaze traveled from the too-large jacket covering her to the man sitting on her designated seat in the office leisurely playing with the paper weights on her table. Imlie shook off the remnants of sleep and silently gave her aching neck a few stretches.
“No one is allowed to sit on my chair without my explicit permission, you know.” Imlie said as she stretched her arms above her head and her legs in front of her.
“How fortunate that I am the only No One in your life.” Aryan chuckled and put the paper weight back on its place. He didn’t get up from the chair.
“How long you’ve been here for?” Imlie got the whiff of his smell from his jacket and subconsciously snuggled into it.
“Not long. You frown in your sleep.” Aryan informed her and Imlie rolled her eyes.
“Yes, I’ve been told that.”
“Why?”
“Happens when I fall asleep without exhaustion forcing my systems to shutdown.”
“That’s not healthy.”
“Yeah well, it works for me.”
Aryan sat up straight in the chair and focused his gaze on Imlie. From where he sat, she looked so tiny all snuggled up with his jacket covering the entirety of her upper body right up to her chin. Her open hair was framing her face giving her the look of a child. The Imlie Satyakaam from the now viral interview was nowhere to be found in the Imaliya that he was sitting on the other side of the room from him.
“What?”
Imlie questioned him when his gaze become too heated and fixated on her for a little too long. When Aryan didn’t budge, the frown returned on Imlie’s face. The jacket started feeling heavy on her. Annoyance crept over her entire body.
Clicking her tongue, Imlie roughly threw the jacket aside and got up from the sofa. She ran a hand through her hair to tame them before buttoning her shirt. Glancing at the clock in the office she realized that all the employees must have left for the day except for some late shift janitorial staff. And they had seen her having late nights in the office plenty of times for her to bother being completely prim and proper in front of them. So, she decided against wearing her heels and made a move to leave the office.
Imlie hesitated just for a second at the door and gave a sideway glance at Aryan who was, still, looking at her but not saying anything. Or making any move to follow her.
Childish.
As always.
She pulled open the door with a forceful yank and stormed out of the there. By the time she reached her car in the parking basement, Imlie was out of breath from the strain of walking down fourteen flights of stairs as well as the anger that had once again consumed her.
How dare he? How dare he come back?
And now that he was back, he had taken over all her conscious and subconscious thoughts. He had even pushed back her usual, friendly flashes of nightmares to take the center stage of her sleep. The echo of the door slamming shut behind him as he left her all those years ago had started to ring in her head again.
How dare he?!
Imlie sat in her car and sped out. Her body was on autopilot mode. She didn’t know where it was taking her. All she knew was that she needed to getaway from any place where he could be found. Even if it meant going out of the city, so be it.
After driving for about twenty-five minutes, Imlie glanced at the sideway mirror to see a familiar car trailing her. Angry, but not surprised because she knew he’d have come hovering behind her, Imlie put on the horn as if that would’ve warded Aryan, stupid, stubborn, childish Aryan away.
He retorted by joining in with the horn of his car and collective noise of their cars’ horns ran through her head like a drill. Crying out in frustration Imlie severed the car down a road she knew would take her to an empty ground and as soon as she reached an open clearing, she drifted her car to a stop.
She was out of the car ready to finally confront Aryan before his car had even stopped.
“What? What what WHAT is your goddamn problem?!”
Imlie started screaming at Aryan as soon as he got out of the car.
“You forgot your heels in the office.” Aryan dangled her heels in the air as he approached her. Once he reached her, he took her hand and gently place the straps of the heels on her fingers so now she held them.
Imlie stared at the shoes in her hand. Then she looked up at Aryan who was kicking pebbles on the ground.
And she hurled the shoe right at his head.
“OYE! That could’ve poked my eye!” Aryan protested as he ducked out of the way right at the perfect time. Imlie didn’t care and launched the second shoe at him. It, too, narrowly missed the target. She didn’t give Aryan any time to rest and picked up fist full of dirt from the ground and threw that at him. When that didn’t satisfy her, she did it again. She didn’t care if she looked like a mad woman doing that. The anger within her had fully consumed her and it was bursting out however it pleased.
“Stop it! Imlie! Oi! That hurt me! Imlie..Imaliya! Stop this!!” Aryan defended himself with his arms and when his verbal protests didn’t work, he finally reached out and strongly held Imlie’s arms to stop her from attacking him.
“That’s real mature of you Imlie!” Aryan roared and just that word, that one word enraged Imlie all over again.
“YOU LITTLE PIECE OF SHIT!” Imlie kicked Aryan’s shin as strongly as she could and Aryan let go of her arms to clutch his now aching leg. Imlie launched another bout of attack on him this time in the shape of punches.
“You. Childish. Piece. Of. Shit!” She punctuated every word with a punch.“ You. Useless. Annoying. As*hole. You. Coward! How dare you? How DARE you come back like this?!”
Aryan had stopped defending himself and was now silently taking on her punches.
“If you were gone you should’ve stayed away! Why are you back? Why are you back?!Go, run, stay out of reach! Why are you back? Why did you leave?!”
A sob tore through her body at that last word. She stopped hitting him as tears rolled down her cheek. The rage was overcome by grief as once again the scene of him leaving her flashed in her mind again. The loud slam of the door echoed all around her.
“You..left. You left! Without looking back! Years. Years I waited! You didn’t reach out. No call. No message. You just left. Why? Why? WHY?” Another rush of anger coursed through her veins and Imlie tightened her fist once again to land a blow. But this time, Aryan stopped her hand mid-air.
“Why did you leave?!” Imlie screamed.
“Because you f*king got MARRIED!” Aryan’s scream was louder. Imlie froze on the spot.
“You f**king got married to that Tripathi! You chose to marry him! You chose HIM! Nineteen is hardly the age to make wise career choices but you were so f**king enamored by the idealistic and brave and oh-so-inspiring Aditya Kumar Tripathi that you went against all better judgement to f**king get married to him!”
It was Aryan’s turn to let out all his rage. The rage that he had been holding within him for years. The disappointment and anger at his best friend, for making the dumbest decision of her life without even bothering to ask him, that he had been trying to and failing at for years to make peace with was all coming out right here. The mind-numbing rage that had made him make the dumbest decision of his life, the decision of staying away. Even when he knew she needed him. Especially when he knew she needed him.
“You didn’t even ask me. You didn’t even bother to f**king discuss it with me! You just told me about your decision as if I was an irrelevant passerby that you came across on the street. And the reason? Apparently, I wasn’t “mature” enough to understand the grand logic behind your decision! Bloody f**k!” Aryan angrily let go of Imlie’s arm and spat on the ground. The force with which he let her go had her staggering. But she held her ground.
“The man was a good decade older than you and a walking red flag! But nope! The great Miss Imlie, wise beyond her age, more mature than any of her peers, who only felt “understood” when in the company of that piece of shit Tripathi because he felt for the weak and powerless and had way with words, didn’t feel any need to even doubt her decision! Wow! A huge round of applause ladies and gentlemen for this spectacular display of wisdom!” Aryan sarcastically and loudly clapped at the end of his own sentence. Imlie only bit her bottom lip hard enough to draw blood but she didn’t say anything.
The clouds rumbled in the sky. The wind picked up speed. But the two reconnected friends didn’t register the change in the weather around them.
“What did you want me to do? Apologize for being myself?! Yes, Imlie! I was young and I was spoiled and I didn’t give a flying f*ck about what happened in the world because I was so bloody comfortable with my privilege! I was f**king twenty-two! I hardly understood what I wanted from my life let alone care about the troubles of the world! And if you were really so mature back then you would’ve understood that instead of labeling me “childish” and “immature” and disregarding every f**king word I had to say!”
Aryan’s throat had gone hoarse from all the screaming. But he wasn’t done. This was years of anger, years of no communication, years of disappointment pouring all out from within him. Just like the clouds had started pouring down above them.
“I joked with you. I pulled your leg. I couldn’t fake understanding for your grand ambitions. Because you knew, at least I thought you knew, that beneath all of that I had nothing but care and respect for you! Care that was bordering on love. And I thought surely, surely with all of your maturity you saw that. You saw what you meant for me. Surely, you understood. But bless me and my shitty life! What prize did I get for all that blind trust on you? ‘Oh Aru, you are the kind of person who isn’t born to ever grow up. Being immature is a fate you cannot fight!’ Wow Imlie, that was surely very mature of you.”
“And didn’t you prove me right?” Imlie lashed out, taking advantage of the pause he had taken to catch his breath. “When did you ever act mature?!You walked out of my life making that stupid cowardly vow of never coming back again all because I hurt your childish ego! You threw a bloody tantrum for years when you knew, you knew, I needed you! I needed my best friend to be by my side at the lowest point of life! But where were you?!Nowhere around me!”
Aryan’s lower lip trembled and Imlie knew that the moistness in his eyes was not due to the rain. And that broke her heart. Despite everything, seeing him hurt still broke her heart.
“It was...the worst year of my life. One bad decision cost me everything. That sham of a marriage didn’t last a year but I will carry the wounds from it till my dying breath. Physically, mentally, emotionally...in what ways did that man didn’t break me? I thought I was oh-so-wise and oh-so-mature to take on both the responsibility of marriage and satisfy the inflated ego of a man-child but every step of the way he made me realize just how powerless I was. He treated me like the child as I was. Playing with me when he felt like it, brushing me off rudely when he felt like it. Fed me when he wished, locked me up as per his whims. Reprimanded me for speaking quietly. Insulted me for being loud. I was broken and bleeding everyday but no one was around me to pick me and take me home.”
The blood within her veins turned to pain and circulated all within her. Her body shook with sobs as she once again cried for her wrecked youth. It was just one bad decision. It was just one bad year. She had recovered so much. She had done so well in picking herself up over the years. Her future was bright. If she continued to work on herself like this, she would eventually forget all of this like a bad dream. These words of assurance and encouragement were regularly said to her by her parents, her therapist, her friends, like reminders. And she never had the strength to tell them that this nightmare had already attached itself to her like a phantom limb.
“When I was recovering…I knew you knew. I waited by the phone for hours hoping you’d call. I’d sit by the door at any hour of the day wanting to be there when you would come running in. I hung around Kakimaa and Arpita Di for no reason but to try to snatch any information I could about you from their fleeting conversations. There was so much I wanted to say to you. There was so much I wanted to share. Because I knew if there was one person who would understand me, it was you. But you weren’t there. You were never there.”
Aryan took a shuddering sob and covered his eyes with his hand as the intensity and speed of his tears increased. Crying over lost time. Crying over lost courage. Crying about every single time Di or Maa told him about Imlie losing herself in the depths of depression that she would lock herself in her room for days and Satyakaam would have to break open the door to see her wasting away in the bed. Crying about all the times he admonished himself for acting like a selfish brat and confirming his ticket back home only to not board the flight on time because he would remember how she brought it all upon herself by not listening to him. Crying because of the realization that she was right about him.
“Then one day, I stopped. I stopped waiting for you. I stopped expecting you. I just…stopped. I focused my entire energy on recovering and putting everything behind me. I vowed to never depend on anyone again. I made peace with the fact my assumptions about you when I was nineteen and you were twenty-two were right. That you were you were childish, and immature, and not worth sparing a single thought. It was a lie, I knew it was a lie, but I clung to it because otherwise I would have gone crazy from longing for you.”
Imlie saw the crying man standing near her, so ashamed of facing her that he had his body turned away from her and had hidden his face with his hands. She touched her arm which he had held to stop her from hitting him. His calloused hand had left a mark there.
“Di told me what you had been up to abroad. She was worried sick for you. You were taking all sorts of odd jobs, refusing to stay in one place long enough to track you down. When Arvind Jiju managed to get a hold of you, you made him swear not to take you back. Right when I was on my road to recovery, you were spiraling down in your own pits of depression. Kakimaa had looked at me one day, her eyes hopeful that I’ll reach out to you and save you from your guilt. But she couldn’t bring herself to ask me. So, I pretended not to have seen anything. For once in my life…I did the childish thing.”
It was the oddest of places. It was the strangest of ways. The two of them were having a conversation that should’ve taken place somewhere warmer, somewhere safer. But here they were – drenched from head to toe in the pouring rain, shivering both from the cold and the overwhelming emotions. Standing near each other but not daring to face each other. Both of them crying, for themselves, for the other. Ten lost years separated them over the distance of three steps. Both struggling to find the courage to take the first step forward.
After a long while had passed, or maybe it happened between the one heartbeat and the next, Aryan and Imlie managed to look at each other and saw the battered and bruised souls of Aru and Imaliya staring back at them. And that’s all that it took.
Imlie half raised her arms to reach out to Aryan and with a single leap, Aryan was there to engulf her in his arms. Her arms went around his neck as afresh new wave of tears flew out of her eyes. She clung to him as he clung to her with the desperation of a dying man holding on to the last tether of his life. He lifted her off the ground still holding her close to him as physically possible.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”
“I missed you, I missed you, I missed you…”
Apologies and confessions mixed with each other as the pouring rain slowed down to a drizzle.
-x-
'Wait, did you drive all the way here bare feet?'
'...shut up.'
-x-
Later, much later in the night, Imlie and Aryan found themselves in a random roadside dhabba. Eyes puffy from all the crying, throats hoarse from all the screaming, bodies shivering from all the cold; and yet the two of them hadn't been this at peace in a long, long while.
When the waiter served them two steaming hot glasses of tea, Aryan reached out for his glass with a sigh. Imlie, however, did not share his enthusiasm and gave the glass a suspicious look before reaching out to pick it up. Aryan noticed her silently observing the glass and her hesitancy in taking a sip from it with amusement.
Times really do change people.
"It's not the greatest but I have had worse." Aryan assured her after he took a sip from his glass. He had stopped caring about how food tasted for years now. As long as it sustained him, he was okay with it. And right now, the warmth of this bitter tea was a blessing for him.
"I'd rather not. I get an upset stomach if I eat something out of the ordinary." Imlie shook her head and put the glass back down. She tightened Aryan's jacket around her to get more external warmth from it.
"Don't worry. I am sure they have a bathroom here." Aryan smirked. The look of absolute horror on Imlie's face at the suggestion made him laugh.
"Goodness gracious Miss CEO! Since when did you become so snooty?"
"I'm not snooty! I just have an aversion to places where I will be discomforted. My therapist says it's part of my defense mechanism to make sure I don't fall back into situation that reminds me of my abuse.”
And it was the very logical, matter-of-fact way with which she said it that had Aryan thinking that even time could not touch people in a way to make them completely unrecognizable.
“Okay, pay up. We have a long journey back home!” Aryan put the glass down and rubbed his hands. Imlie raised her eyebrows.
“Excuse me? I didn’t have anything here. You should be the one paying.”
“Umm..Imlie? This is not a joke. You can’t possibly be expecting a jobless man who literally blew up all his savings to buy a plane ticket back home to be paying here.”
“Well then why did you suggest we have tea at this godforsaken dhabba?!” Imlie furiously whispered under her breath, looking around to make sure no one heard her.
“Because it’s cold and I am tired and I really expected you to be able to pay for some tea! Goodness woman you have got to be the most useless CEO in the world!” Aryan retorted and earned himself a knock on the head.
“What should we do? Should we just make a run for it?” Imlie conspired in a mutter and Aryan rolled his eyes.
“No. We’ll do the mature thing here.”
“And that is?”
-x-
The owner of the dhabba was an old man with a body that was still very much capable of being self-reliant, thank you very much. Every line on his wrinkled face was testament of the many experiences he had faced in his life. He had genuinely thought life was out of surprises to give him. And yet, here he was.
“Sorry Uncle.” The tall man who looked like he had the strength to fight a bull and not break a sweat was standing in front of him, face hanging in shame.
“Ji, sorry Uncle. Woh ghalti se mera cash wala purse ghar pe hi reh gaya.Aur hum ghar se itni durr hain ke pata bhi nahin hain kahan hain toh koi aa bhi nahin sakta paise le ke…” said the woman, who suspiciously looked like the woman whose video had been forwarded in the family whatsapp group by one of his granddaughters earlier in the day with a passionate message of marriage not being the end all-be all of a girl’s life and that women had the strength and the grit to not let their abuse define them and some other words that he hadn’t read beneath the ‘read more’ option. The old man glared at her trying to make sure he wasn’t mistaken. But she couldn’t be her. The woman in the video was all graceful and poised, her entire aura oozing confidence. The woman in front of him was being nudged in the side by the man who was trying to communicate with her with his eyes.
The old man opened his mouth to ask her if she really was the CEO woman that his granddaughter had been raving on about all day but just then, the man and the woman held their ears like little kids and started apologizing profusely for being unable to pay for the tea. The owner frowned.
No, this couldn’t be her.
“Theek hai, theek hai. Jao. Per aainda yahan apni shakal bhi na dikhana!” He waved them off and gave them a warning that he didn’t actually mean. The pair’s face lighted up and the two of them started a new spiel of thanking the old man and blessing his seven generations with prosperity. And before the old man could pick up his trusted lathi to literally shoo away the pair of troublemakers, the man and the woman ran away from there.
The old man had seen many profound and moving sights in his long life that had stuck with him. So many that he had thought he was out of the capability of experiencing anything new and the capacity of storing anything new. But as the sun broke through the horizon signaling the start of a new day, and the old man witnessed the sight of that man and the woman holding hands and running towards their car, their faces etched with a laughter he couldn’t comprehend; he thought to himself that when the final showreel of his life will flash by him during his last breaths, this sight would be one of the flashes. And it’d be this sight, amongst the many others from his long life, that would bring him the calm to let go.
Ah. The life lived was worth all the troubles.
-x-
A/N : This is like almost 6k words long. Pat yourself on the back if you have reached this point after reading everything from the top xD I thrive in AUs. And seeing Imlie in the CEO avatar had my mind running like nothing else. I know this is like a complete opposite of what normal. was. And if I am being honest..I didn't originally plan for this to be so...dark? For reals my initial plan was to write a Vella Aru x CEO Imlie OS full of banter and maybe some UST (oh definitely some major UST) but like with normal. this took a life of its own when I starting getting deep into it. At a point Ifelt like I was just venting? The whole middle section was just me venting btw. I know it's a bit messy and a little all over the place and has like two major tonal shifts but eh. My focus is to just enjoy writing and I definitely enjoyed writing this.
Once more, I await everyone's generous feedback. Thank you for all the love you had showered on normal. I hope that the people who wanted more of my writing were not disappointed by this.
P.S. Special shout of gratitude to the love of my life for giving me an idea of how to conclude this <3
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