Latte Or Mocha

09|Feef and Dan

Mustafa reentered the graveyard long after everyone else had gone back home including Daniyal. With shaky legs and heavy heart he took steps closer towards Afifa's recently made grave. The grave that he made for Afifa with his own hands. Seeing the grave upclose strewn with fresh rose petals, the gravity of the situation hit him at full force and he sank to his knees due to the impact.

The feeling of numbness was replaced by one of agony as he realised how he had killed his own friend. Tears fell from his eyes as he knelt infront of the grave and the onslaught of their memories from back when they were young came back to him.

Fifa was the first girl he had befriended at the new school that he had moved to in Grade 4. He was paired with Fifa by the teacher on the very first day because he was a new student while she was a smart old one. They had sat besides each other throughout Grade 4 and 5 since Daniyal was in a different class section. He remembered how she had dragged Daniyal towards him during the lunch break in Grade 4 and introduced them to each other. Where he was the new friend she had made, Dan got introduced as her all time bestie. Mustafa had tried to hang out with them together during the early days but despite both of them trying to make him feel included, he had felt  quite awkward between these two bestfriends and so he had distanced himself from them during lunch breaks and had mingled with other kids who hailed from a similar political or army background.

Mustafa had mostly spent his class hours with Fifa but lunch breaks with other friends till Grade 5. He remembered clearly as she would always try to help him solve questions if she saw him struggling with it by turning her notebook in his view so that he could copy the answers and explain them later to him. Where he would mostly keep quite, she would talk about anything and everything on end, something he found quite irritating at that time but eventually came to miss when Daniyal joined the same section in Grade 6. Fifa and Daniyal were inseparable, they were bestfriends since Grade 1 or even before that so it was only natural that when Daniyal shifted to their section, Fifa would sit with him always or if they wouldn't sit besides each other they would be closeby, sharing chits, whispering during class and enjoying among themselves.

Mustafa didn't think he would get so affected by Daniyal's joining their section but he was. Though, there were countless friends he had made by that time and quite some hot girls became his friend, he found Fifa and him drifting apart. He no longer seemed to exist when Dan was around and the fact that it was not just limited to lunch breaks but almost all their classes pricked him the wrong way. Maybe it was because of the fact that he always had attention of people esp. girls around him, that the loss of Fifa's attention rubbed him the wrong way or maybe it was the sudden replacement that bothered him more than he liked to admit.

He didn't know why Fifa was important to him, why he craved her attention and missed her stories, why he felt a sharp pang of jealousy seeing her look at Daniyal like he was her entire world in all these years. He never admitted those feelings before but now sitting at her grave he couldn't stop thinking about them. He deliberately called her Fifa where else everyone esp. Dan called her Feef, took up taekwondo in the same academy as hers just so that he could bask in all her attention even if it was just for the duration of the match. He lived for those moments where she would challenge him, come up with new tricks and even play foul whilst fighting him. And upon losing the match to him she would make promises to defeat him in the next round.

"Tafi take it easy man! What are you out there to kill me?" she would always say after losing to him.

Neither of them knew Fifa's light comment would come true as one day, Mustafa would literally dig her grave. Mustafa couldn't stop the waterfalls as he reminisced about their times together. He wanted to touch her grave and apologize but he couldn't even bring his hands to touch the grave. The hand that murdered her and showed her no mercy despite her pleadings to spare her life minutes before he sedated her. It resounded in his ears like a broken record and he tried to cover them to block the pleadings but it was all in vain.

Mustafa didn't know how long he stayed besides Fifa's grave trying to apologize for what he had done before his bodyguards came and took him away as some people were heading in the same direction as Fifa's grave and they didn't want to risk exposure. Upon reaching his house in the city, Mustafa went under the cold shower to wash away all the dirt, tears, and blood that was on his hand. But neither did the blood wash off nor did his misery.

He headed off to the vine cellar and mixed several drinks before he chugged them down. He wanted to forget about everything, about how he killed Fifa, their memories together that haunted him since he killed her. He didn't know what drugs and booze he ended up mixing together just so that he could fall asleep and escape the reality.

However, several hours after passing out on the counter, he woke up to the hallucination of Fifa's half burnt body standing in front of him asking what her mistakes were to be killed so brutally, how he didn't spare her mercy despite calling her a friend, how inspite of her incessant pleas and promises of keeping quiet he killed her, how despite loving her he killed her so easily just to save his family's grace. But before Fifa's ghost could advance further towards him, Mustafa took several steps backwards and fell backwards losing his balance while hitting his head on the table edge and blacking out.

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