Teeny Tiny Shots|✓

Melancholiously Mine ✓

Tags: Unrequited love/Hurt-Comfort/ Happy ending

Word Count: 4k words

He watches as she walks one step and hops the other, circling the garden, gently petting the flowers. He smiles back when she gazes up at him with a smile in her eyes and chuckle on her lips, her head thrown back slightly, tresses of hair waving with the winter breeze, her cold lips gaining their colour as they stretch to show her perfect teeth.

"Shubh!" Smriti calls and he swears to have not loving his name more than in this moment. She beckons him with her hands, "Come on!" she urges and he almost runs, not wanting to miss the moment where she's seeking him, a moment where it's his name on her giggling tongue and not the other way around.

"Look, they're so tiny," it's the back of his garden and he's never noticed the little home a bird has built on the newly grown shrub, little birdies cooing through the twigs. But it isn't their sight that has him smiling, it's the girl bent to their level with magic in her eyes as she coos at them, her lashes shining with a sheen from smiling so much.

"Cute," he unknowingly whispers and she looks up at him, nodding her head.

"Right? They are so tiny, so cute," and he nods in return even if the compliment wasn't meant for the little birdies. She won't ever listen to his adjectives for her anyway.

It's his bad, his worst, that he likes someone who can never like him back, would never like him back.

He has never told her that, never voiced with the confession, but he doesn't think he's going to do it. Not if it'll stifle the giggles escaping her mouth or shun the twinkling in her eyes.

And that's because he has gathered enough - observing the girl in front of him for years now - he has gathered who is actually in her heart and who in her head.

He could be wrong, he so wishes to be wrong but the shimmer in her eyes never betray his claim. As soon as he comes in front of her, his beloved brother, and conjures an effortless blush from her cheeks, Shubh knows this is it, knows that it's love, something truer than what he feels for her, for their eyes talk to each other for what feels like hours and lips remain silent, busy smiling, while he's left talking to himself, his eyes empty and lips murmuring condolences to his heart.

He never could give the stamp of the word 'love' to whatever he feels for the girl in front of her, very well knowing how unfair it would be to the partner he'll have by his side in future. He wouldn't want to make them suffer just as he's suffering in this moment, he wouldn't want his future partner to feel their heart shred into pieces when he'd tell them about a girl that they'll probably never compare to, the girl he had lived and breathed for.

A ring breaks the train of his thoughts that inevitably would have led him to his destruction; a mixture of the unrequited like and the definition of love standing right in front of his eyes.

"Yes?"

There's a voice on the other side of the phone, too familiar yet not enough. He'd like to address her as his twin even though they aren't remotely close to being related.

Rashi.

It's just the same longing in her eyes that he finds his reflection in, when she gazes at the cubicle opposite her own, at a man who can never be hers just like the girl in front of him who'd never be his.

"Can you come to the office?" her voice is urgent yet quivering. It makes his heart drop to his stomach. "Please..." and he doesn't think he could've moved away any faster after that, making an instant decision - no questions asked - leaving the one he cherishes for someone who he understands, who is him.