Shape of the Sun

Pretty little liars

Two days later.

Choti refused to stay in the hospital. All the people there were suffocating, the staff and patients who passed by her door every day in hopes of taking a peep into the room. It was a tragedy, the way she cried to be taken away from there. Her parents didn't listen until Rajkumar came in and signed the release papers after seeing the state that she was in.

His sister was just a step away from crazy.

They were now sitting on the floor of her room, just the two of them. Manmeet was giving Nirali a hand in the kitchen downstairs.

"It's going to be fine, I promise. Everything is going to be fine."

She cried even harder and he hugged her tighter because he know that she needed this comfort. Rajkumar knew that tops, he was mansplaining this. No one could understand Choti's hell as much as she did.

He was right.

Choti felt destroyed, shattered from top to bottom. Her body, her space had been invaded, taken hostage by strangers in a cold, dark place where she couldn't feel her hands except the soreness in them due to rubbing against the cord. She couldn't see their faces. She could feel them, in the worst possible way, because they wanted her to. Those men, six of them, had laughed at the tears on her face even as she begged them to stop. They didn't stop and when she kept on pleading, they hit her hard, and when she begged them to kill her, not to let her live and take this shame, they said they had news that would kill her while alive.

They were right.

Choti felt dead the moment they mentioned Mahesh's name. It was like the anchor within was drifting away. They had taken her blood and flushed it down the pipes. 

Ah. It hurt so much that she could die.

"Oh, love."

Rajkumar kept patting her back, encompassing shoulders that trembled, a body racking with painful sobs. It hurt him to see her like this. It hurt him that he was a part of this, that he had been so useless, unable to see past himself a certain year.

But at the same time, his back hurt too from sitting in this position for far too long. It had been three hours and ten minutes.  

It was irksome that he knew exactly how long. It was terrible that he felt lucky to be saved, that there was a part of him that was irritated at the pain he felt. Rajkumar didn't want to question his humanity.

"Rajkumar, uncle is calling you to his study. I would stay with her. You go."

Manmeet stood at the door, a cup of what he didn't know in her hand. He looked up at her, questioning Manmeet with eyes if she was sure. She nodded yes. He didn't let her know that he had heard her approach the door. It was a habit that no one knew.

Well, one person did know. He stood corrected.

His elder sister slowly pulled away from his embrace and silently looked at him, tear marks crisscrossing her face. Rajkumar looked right back and whispered to her.

I will take care of things. Get some rest.

After, he rose to his feet and motioned to Manmeet who was approaching the bedside where he stood. He moved to the side so that she was in the spot he had just left, beside Choti who was still on the floor.

"Thank you."

"Yeah."

Manmeet handed him the cup and sat on the bed, her hands rubbing Choti's in a bid to soothe, kind words spilling from her mouth. She didn't look at him again, all her attention focused on his sister who was now crying all over again, and even though it was the thing to do, something in him disliked it.