Teeny Tiny Shots|✓

Star (Epilogue) ✓

Word Count: 1k words

Gauri lazily walks through the hospital corridors until she reaches the room number matching that on her phone screen. She turns the doorknob and enters the room.

Someone had called for her, well not her specifically but a nurse, and here she is.

The patient, however, is not in the room.

Gauri rolls her eyes tiredly at the carelessness of the patient and thinks about what she should do next. Should she wait? Or should she go?

The patient's absence is their fault, why would she wait for them. It's not like waiting ever gave her anything except for pain, after all.

Sighing, as soon as she thinks about moving out of the room, the sound of a door opening and closing hits her ears and she halts.

She turns back and looks.

She frowns, blinks and gazes again at the sight in front of her and when the pinnacle doesn't disappear, she sighs, because honestly, what the hell!

It's been weeks since Dev left and weeks since she's dreaming about him. But has she started daydreaming as well?

Because in front of her stands the man of her dreams, literally, looking at her with an unreadable expression; his eyes rimmed with a chronic redness and his face an unexplainable mix of sadness and exhaustion and relief.

"What are you doing here?" Gauri asks him once she establishes and accepts that whatever is happening is very much a reality and not a dream.

Dev shrugs and walks back to the bed. "I said I'll come here to get my stitches cut, didn't I?"

Oh yes, he did.

"Yes," Gauri says quietly, trying to exclude any and every emotion from her voice. "But you should have got them cut days ago, I told you they were to be cut within a week. You are late."

He shrugs in return. "Was busy sorting some things out."

''What things?'' Gauri wants to ask out loud but doesn't dare.

She nods.

"Sit on the bed then. I'll just go and fetch the suture tray." She instructs and forces herself to walk out of the room. Once out of the door she presses her hand to her chest and tries to contain her unruly heartbeats even if she knows it isn't how it works medically.

Because in no way, this is happening. It's been four weeks, a whole month since his discharge, a month since she has seen him and a month since she is working in the hospital without any break just to keep her mind distracted and not break down.

And now -

This isn't fair, is it?

Going whenever he feels like it and coming back whenever he does.

Shaking her head, she goes and fetches the tray from the supply room, swiftly entering back into the room. She finds him sitting on the bed pulling the stray threads from the side of the blanket, his eyes blankly gazing at the bathroom door.

He visibly shakes out his reverie when she clears her throat.

His eyes land at her and she sees a look too familiar to that of hope in them. Not sparing it so much of a thought, she asks him to roll up his sweatpants till his knees and he does as he's told.

She is in the middle of cutting the stitches when she hears him saying something. "Hmm?" she asks when she is unable to catch whatever he said, too lost in her dilemma.