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Never Giving Up On You (Final)

A/N: Unedited

Word Count: 4k

This is a new workplace, a new position to uphold, new responsibilities, new relationships, everything’s new except for that same old heart.

The heart that always makes him suffer.

And the key to this heart stands in his line of sight, smiling, celebrating with their new colleagues, looking like the most beautiful version of herself.

Lakshay smiles, his eyes well up with pride and maybe some longing, but that’s ok, it’s an everyday thing.

Everyday he sees his friend achieving something new, making other’s life easier, sharing happiness and bringing smiles to everyone’s faces.

He’s proud of his friend. He likes his friend a lot. He is in love with his friend.

“Lakshay, come join us.” His friend calls and he obliges immediately, blinking back the tears to take a good look at her.

“C’mon, let’s all cut the cake together.” She says, to him and to rest of their acquaintances.
Lakshay joins but dioesn’t dare touch her hand, instead let’s the person, the man standing beside him envelope her hand, all happy. Khanak looks back at him with a questioning look but when she sees him smiling, she smiles back and they all cut the cake.

Lakshay claps the hardest for his darling. What a brilliant girl. Wherever she goes she makes a name for herself. He got lucky with such a friend.

They all get back to their respective works after that, Khanak to her cabin and Lakshay to his cubicle and then he thinks.

He thinks and regrets.

He thinks, regrets and atones.

He curses the old him, the old Lakshay who had taken that relationship for granted, who had dared to question the love of his life regarding her love for him, who had made her feel helpless, the old Lakshay who has made him like this, who has taken away the most beautiful relationship of his life and placed it so out of reach that he can’t even think of going back to it.

He is scared of himself.

He regrets doing all of that because even if it was the old him, it was still him. He can’t make the past better but he can save his future, can make the person he had lost in his past to be in his future, and so he atones.

He atones by keeping himself as far as he can from the woman he is ready to die for, from the woman he would surely die without. And yet this atonement is also full of flaws.
He finds himself unable to give her up fully.

No, he doesn’t get jealous when the guys from their departmemt give her flowers and small gifts every second day, for winnng her heart or their promotion, he doesn’t know and doesn’t care. Lakshay doesn’t feel curious when he doesn’t find Khanak in her cabin or in the office for hours, and just murmurs a prayer for her to be safe always. He laughs with her even if it isn’t him who is making her laugh. It doesn’t matter who is. What matters is the smile on her face. It must never deter. He hopes.

But he is scared.

He knows he can’t keep the pretension up for too long. Can’t hide the feelings that a friend could never have for another friend. He barely resisted bursting into her cabin the other day when she had returned from the field work, injured, and taking her into his arms, coddling her and asking her how it all happened. If she was ok or not and kissing her wound better. Instead, he had knocked and asked if he could bandage the wound.

The saddened look that he had got in return, he couldn’t make anything out of it.

Lakshay must be out of his mind because the moment he had stepped outside her cabin, he had thought and dreamt. He still does. He dreams of doing everything with Khanak that a couple in a relationship does, that a man and his wife do, because of course he had accepted her as his wife in his heart long ago. It had to be her or no one.