[valentine's day specials!]

for my beautiful child ahl ♥ happy early valentine's day! you were so excited to read this, so i thought i'll publish the first half of it now, and the second half on valentine's day itself (if i finish it by then lmao) i love you ahl ♥♥♥ i tried ;A;

ps. this twoshot will be chuuya x ahl, not a reader insert, bc chuuya belongs to my bahliy-- //slapped

•••

It was typical of love when someone gets their hearts broken.

Ahliy wasn't sure if she was a sadist or not, but she thought the pain that people felt at that was beautiful when described perfectly.

"He's sad."

A man crosses the road, his hands filled with shopping bags as he neared the street her house was on.

"She's depressed."

A woman steps on the pavement while holding a baby close to her chest, and Ahl can only let out a sigh. Even as she stood on the second-floor balcony, it felt as if she could see the tears that were threatening to escape from the woman's eyelids.

Ahl turns her attention away from the woman, then looks to her right. She sees a person in a trenchcoat cross the road next, walking in fast strides and entering the building she lived in before she could get a proper look at his face.

But from the way he had a hand over his hat and how he was limping slightly, Ahl found herself letting a sigh.

"He's mentally and physically hurt."

"Ahliy, get off from the balcony and go do your homework!" She hears her mother call. Sighing, she shuts the door and gets back inside. She hears a loud bang of a door closing from downstairs while she shuts the sliding doors of the balcony.

Life was like that, nothing more, nothing less. The daily routine of waking up, school, coming back, homework... And repeating it on and on.

It bothered her, the fact that everything was... never changing.

She hears soft music coming from the floor below her, and she feels her heart ache a little at the lyrics.

Ahl craved a change, and at the moment when she closed the doors, she was desperate.

For the better, or even for the worse.

---

"Don't be out late!" Ahl's mom calls out, as she puts on her shoes.

"Yes, Mom." She responds, standing up with her school bag. Taking the house keys, she steps outside, going down the stairs. When she reaches the floor below hers, she hears familiar music, that makes her dart her eyes away.

'Oh, there she goes again, Every morning, it's the same.

You walk on by my house, I wanna call out your name.'

It had been a week since she started hearing the same music every day. From what she noticed, it was on right before she left for school, when she came back, and a while before she went to bed.

It was a beautiful song, but even the first bit of the music makes her feel uneasy. She wasn't sure why. Shrugging, she walks downstairs, heading down to the bus-stop and off to school- another day, where she just wanted to escape everything.

The cold wintery nights were starting to come to an end. Ahl didn't feel as cold as she used to a couple months back. Walking the fifteen or so blocks from the bus station back to home was something she really, really hates. The lights on the streets flickered as she walks back home after school, tapping on her phone as she scrolls through multiple apps.

What makes her look up is the honking of a car, and her eyes go wide as she watched the car coming towards her in horror, unable to move.

From the background, she hears a voice chanting something, right before she sees the car lifting up into thin air.

Ahl blinks in shock at the vehicle, before it crashes noisily at one of the light posts. She feels her whole body shake in horror before she feels a hand gripping on her wrists.

"Stop standing there if you don't want to be a person on the suspects list." A voice hisses and Ahl finds herself getting dragged by a familiar figure, she couldn't really see his face because of the dim lights.

"What's going on?!" She cries when they hide behind a narrow alleyway. While they watched the car engine explode, Ahl can only gasp while watching the scene.

"It's nothing. Go take that road," The man says, pointing to the other side of the road, "And go home. You don't want to get suspected by the Police."

She wasn't sure what she should do, but she had no choice but to listen to the man.

And before she runs off, she makes sure to take a good look at him.

I've seen him before...

And with that thought, she finds herself on her toes when she reaches home, after having dinner, and even as she laid on her bed, trying to sleep.

But Ahl couldn't sleep that night.

---

It was 4 am when she heard the music again.

It was barely audible, but she could hear it alright.

'I wanna tell you how beautiful you are from where I'm standing,

You got me thinking what we could be.'

Ahl steps out to the balcony, rubbing her heavy-lidded eyes. The music grows noticeably louder from when she was first in her room, so she looks downstairs to see where it was coming from. To her utter shock, she sees the man from earlier resting his arms on the wall of the balcony and looking up at the sky. When he notices Ahl looking down, he lifts his head up a little, his eyes widening as he recognises her face.

Ahl jolts up, her heart racing when she closes the balcony door as soon as she could. For once, she was scared when she hears the noise of loud footsteps, right before there is irritable knocking on the door.

She didn't want to open the door, but she couldn't not open it either, not if she didn't want her parents to wake up. With no choice, she opens it, her eyes furrowed while she glares at him.

"Stop, stop STOP." She hisses, stepping outside and closing the door. The man with the orange hair is looking at her in confusion, as she presses a finger to her lips.

"My parents are sleeping." She lets him know, which makes the man cross his hands over his chest.

"At least you have parents." He mumbles so softly that Ahl barely heard him.

But she did alright.

"Oh..."

For once, she is at a loss for words and if it wasn't for the man to lean against the wall beside the door and speak, there would have been silence for a very, very long time.

"So. You do realise that you've seen things you shouldn't have, right?"

"How did you do that?" She expresses her curiosity, making him flinch a little. "And what's your name? Who are you? What are you?"

He does not reply, instead glancing at her for a while, before he turns around, hands in his pocket.

"Nakahara Chuuya. You need to pretend that you don't know me, that'll be safer for everyone, both you, me, and the entire world's lore."

And as she saw the way Chuuya walks downstairs, she felt something cold grip her heart.

Because he looked noticeably sad.

Has no one ever looked at him properly to notice these things?

And thus, she found herself even more curious about the mysterious man in the hat, who lived a floor below hers.

---

'Cuz I keep craving, craving,

You don't know it but it's true.'

A loud hiss escapes from Ahliy's lips, she hated that song. But then again, she knew she was biased regarding how she felt about the song since there wasn't anything particularly wrong with it.

More accurately put, the song hurt her, and that was why she wanted to pour water over whichever device Nakahara Chuuya was using to play the notorious music from.

Speak of the devil, he appears; this statement is true, and Ahl is able to learn this when Chuuya opens the door to his apartment right when she begins to climb down the staircase to his floor. No words are said as Chuuya hurries to rush down the stairs, Ahl following downstairs. Once again, his hands find their way to his pockets, his trench coat swaying in the wind. 

The late January cold makes Ahl tremble as she walked to the bus stop. She didn't have the intention to follow him, but Chuuya thinks otherwise, when he too, stops at the same exact spot.

"I told you to stay away."

"Shut up, I'm not following you. I have school I need to go to."

Chuuya seems taken aback with her response, moving his neck a little backwards as he looks down at the ravenette standing beside him. More silence welcomes the two, and they step into the bus, sitting in two corners of the bus - Two strangers on the verge of losing themselves.

And they knew it. They were aware, and that was what made their heart hurt slightly when they climbed off the bus later; walking to two different paths.

---

Ahl never realised how stubborn she was until she started igniting curiosity towards Nakahara Chuuya. He had an odd love for hats, as seen by the pathetic ones he would wear all the time. But then again, whenever she saw him without one, it hits her; that Chuuya wouldn't be...well, Chuuya, if he didn't wear one.

What started off as randomly getting forced to sit beside each other on the bus turned into little talks amongst the two on their way back to their apartments. He tried to deny the fact that he liked her company, often trying to convince her that she should stay away from him. But that was bullshit, Ahl just knew.

Why else did he give her a box of pasta, when she started to avoid him?

'Can't get my mind to say the words they wanna say to you.

This is typical of love.'

Ahl could easily remember the day she skipped school, instead following Chuuya down to the Port Mafia base. Her body had frozen when she realised just what he was involved with... And yet, she couldn't hate him.

Similar to the hat... That was something that made him who he was... How could Ahl even think of hating him?

Even when he had yelled at her when he found her hiding baselessly behind a pillar, all she could do was giggle.

"This is interesting. What do you do here?"

Those words didn't just shock Chuuya himself, but it surprised her as well. She was slowly starting to become biased towards him.

He found himself confessing to her all about Port Mafia. About what he did, all the things he would refuse to tell everyone else.

He felt a slight burden lift from his heart at that.

"Ahl," Chuuya speaks in a low voice, hands in his pockets as he walked alongside her one night. She could easily notice that he was taking shorter steps than he usually would if he were alone, as he now tried to keep up with the pace Ahl walked in.

"Ahl," He says again, making her turn to face him a little. "Why do you not hang out with your friends?"

"What?"

"You're a teenager. You should be having fun at school with your friends... Going out with someone... That kind of thing."

"Oh. I'm too awkward for that." She responds with a laugh. "And besides, I'd rather stay away from heartbreak."

Ahl immediately noticed the way Chuuya moves his head away at the last word. It was obvious to her that he felt the same way, so she stops walking.

"Let's go this way." She suggests, pointing out to the outer road.

"That's longer than our usual path." He points out.

"It doesn't matter."

Chuuya felt like he had no other choice but to follow her, which he did, all while he complained about dragging him around against his wishes.

There is a little bench under an oak tree, one that Ahl had loved seeing ever since she was little. She loved the pattern of the leaves, the way they would randomly fall on her lap. Chuuya thought it was stupid, how she could get so excited about something so petty, and yet, he couldn't get himself to tell her to stop it.

"Why are you staring at me?" She asks as she takes a sip of juice.

"Because you're an idiot."

"I'm offended."

"It was meant to offend you." Chuuya has to say. Ahl sighs, it was hard to communicate with him, what with his secretive nature, and she lets out a sigh.

"Chuuya, what do you think of love?"

Chuuya's response is almost instant.

"Love is a weird emotion. It's weird because, with love, you get all these other emotions. Your other feelings are heightened... sensitive, I'd say. You crave little things. Sometimes, it is physically hurtful, in addition to mentally."

Ahl watched the way Chuuya spoke out everything she had been believing for so long, she had to admit that she was shocked.

"I like angst." Ahl finds herself confessing, and the 22-year-old raises an eyebrow.

"The death kind of angst, or the sick kind of angst?"

"I don't know. I just like all angst."

"So you want your life to be angsty too?" Chuuya asks, making Ahl blink a couple times. She never found herself stuck when it came to questions related to angst... She was not over the fact that someone would even ask her something like that, something she had never even considered once in her life before.

"Well no but-"

"It's getting late. Let's go."

She knew there wasn't any reason for her to argue against. It really was getting late, the sun had gone down long ago. And once Chuuya decides something, she would have no choice but to go along with his stubborn nature.

She followed the man back to their building, Chuuya stopping when he reached the first floor.

"Ahliy."

"Yeah?"

"Angst isn't just about death. There are even more horrible forms of angst. Can you bear them?"

"Don't make something I like sound so scary..."

How was it that when it came from Chuuya, she could not think of one single thing she could say in response?

Her heart doesn't stop throbbing until she falls asleep.

•••

kuroyaoyaoya I AM TRYING TO MAKE THIS SOMETHING YOU'LL LIKE AND ALSO FAILING HORRIBLY BYE- 

;A;