"The stage was being set for the final strike and I was at the precipice!"
-Ranbir Kohli
Her life was a routine set in mundanity, a deliberate choice made to withstand living after sealing up everything that broke her, behind pain and frigidity. But here she was sitting on a park bench, the cold that once kept her grounded now proving itself to be less potent, the shivers wracking her thin frame falling short of serving their purpose, at a complete loss of comprehending what was even wrong with her. For the first time in a long time, the feeling that had taken over her made her feel more and more lost, like the girl she had buried alive in the grave harbored in her soul, the girl she detested for what she couldn't stop, the girl she loathed for being so hapless and helpless, had risen, at least a little from where she had embalmed her shut.
The fear that the mere thought of it triggered was a pungent thing that wrapped around her senses, inducing chaos that her anger couldn't obscure or even express. Her arms wrapped around herself without a moment's hesitation, eyes hazy and unseeing. She was a rose embraced in the grips of the beginnings of a tempest, the biggest undoing of her that she had run from by obscuring it in her own abyss, now reaching up and catching her unawares. Her hands rubbed her cold skin, rubbing warmth that she had long forsaken.
She was here in body, the phantasm of the girl she used to be, slolwy coming back to life again. And in the frazzled array of her thoughts, there seemed to be nothing that was coming to save her from this, this time not even herself!
_
As he stepped in through the window of her house, the one he had used the past two times, he didn't need to check to see if she was home because she wasn't. Her absence in the house she had not even strived to make home completely felt like a vacuum in the cold that always remained. He rubbed his palms together, taking a deep breath to conquer the sudden bout of nervousness that had gripped him. A moment more and he moved to the locked room. It was time for his last strike and that meant, before that, he had to find out what the locked cupboard hid.
Tying a handkerchief around his mouth, he opened the door with more ease that last time. Leaving it slightly ajar, he moved towards the cupboard resolutely and with the same approach that got him to open this room, he managed to open the cupboard. The doors opened with a creak that mildly echoed in this room locked heavily with a past he still knew very little of yet the weight of which was palpable in the stale air.
Hung inside the cupboard was a picture of a family. A dashing young man sat smiling, his arms wrapped around each of his little girls. Suddenly, it all aligned in his head - the name Pranati, the medals, the photo of two girls - sisters! They were sisters and this was Prachi's family!
There were many other pictures, some framed, some stored in albums and through them, Ranbir saw her as a little girl, as a girl who had an innocence to her, a girl who knew joy and how to smile. He saw a girl full of life and love, a girl with her family - a family that, he realized with grief, must have been snatched from her and who better than him to know what the pain it brought felt like!
A tear slipped down his eyes but he wiped it hastily. Prachi had locked the memories of her precious family in this cupboard, almost like she had buried them and for a moment it felt like sheer sacrilege, intruding in on this, even touching it. It felt cruel, this last strike that he intended to go ahead with! And maybe it was, maybe he was wrong but he knew he had to, at the least, try.
And try he would. Because not doing so would be giving up on what may, even if not completely, give a glimmer of life back in her. And he knew, the Prachi in the photos deserved so much of it!
_
He picked each of it, each photo, each album, with gentle, reverent hands and wiped the dust on them. Then he began taking them to the living room and placing them all over, on the empty walls, on the shelves, the mantle, with complete care. He then headed back to the room and began looking through the cartons. Her extreme reaction to seeing the dancers made him hesitate a second when he held the box with the anklets, jhumkas, certificates etc but he knew, he had to. So he took them out and arranged them on the teapoy. The living room was being transformed in a way, to hold her life and everything she had been looking away from. He knew he had to empty the locked room to begin freeing the locked grip of her past that made her such, even if every part of it was hinging on a guess made from all the knowledge he had on her and which was, in all terms, less!
When the last carton had been emptied and kept in the living room, he collapsed by the wall, suddenly so very tired. His throat began to hurt and he pulled the bottle of medicine from his pocket and swallowed the syrup. Now all he had to do, was wait for her to come back home!
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We are heading towards the end.
Do share your views.
Love,
Pratyusha
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Splinters Of Ice | Pranbir
Fanfiction..... Prachi x Ranbir AU ...... // Can be read as general fiction // An enigma she was, unfathomable depths she held within herself. Every interaction with her asserted the same. Yet like moth to the flame, he was drawn to her irrevocably. The plung...
