FLCL Fan Fiction ❯ A Musical Interlude ❯ One-Shot

A Musical Interlude

“Ordinary.”

Ordinary…

Just the sound on his lips, the way his mouth formed the o and continued on to the r sound, straight to the e-sounding y…

What was ordinary in Naota's life anymore?

Things kept popping out of his head, and with the evil alien (now more a term of endearment than anything else) bouncing around him, pulling things out of his head at the strangest moments…

“Ordinary.”

It was a whisper now. It felt strange on his tongue, like something weighing it down.

“Nothing…”

A more comfortable word. Nothing, nothing, nothing, he repeated in his mind, sticking it with other words amused with his own antics.

“Nothing, nothing, nothing. Nothing normal. Nothing real. Nothing, nothing, nothing.”

“Nothing,” a second voice chimed in, lilting her own secret tune, “Nothing's real, nothing exists; I'm nothing, your nothing; nothing, nothing, nothing.”

Somehow he'd expected her to be above him, the housekeeper wannabe, the crazy woman, the evil alien.

Haruko strummed her guitar gracefully. “A butterfly that flaps its wings.”

Naota lifted his head, staring at the bottom of the bed above him. Sometimes he swore she hid up there just to annoy him whenever the moment came.

“This was no accident, this was a therapeutic chain of events.”

A changing of tune. A skip in the lyrics.

“It sure as hell ain't normal, but we deal, we deal/the anesthetic never set in.”

He leaned off the bed in time for her guitar to crash down on his face. She chuckled menacingly before jumping down and swinging the guitar over her shoulder. Naota rubbed his head and cut her a glare.

“You were having a deep moment there,” she said, “I thought I'd help the thought process.”

“Hitting me in the head with a guitar is not going to help my thought process,” he murmured.

She hummed a playful tune. “Staring at the stars in a distant galaxy wondering if there's someone up there staring back at me.”

He shook his head and climbed back onto his bed, covering his face with a pillow. She smiled at him and walked out of the room, still playing:

“It sure as hell ain't normal, but we deal, we deal.”

Author(ess) Notes:

Only recently gotten into the anime and picked up the manga today. Lyrics respectively owned by their rightful owners (Red Hot Chili Peppers (had to use that one `cause she mentions them), PANIC! At the Disco, and Fountains of Wayne), respectively.

More drabble than anything else. I seem to be good at that lately.

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