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khwxbeeda · 5 months

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The Almost Wedding: Ch. III

Ch 1 || Ch 2

Arjun stared out the window as the car raced down the road, deliberately keeping his eyes off of Tanishka, whose fingers were gripping the steering wheel tightly in the periphery of his vision. The night was no longer young— it was well past midnight, and the lights gleaming in the windows of the high-rise buildings almost looked like stars against the pitch black sky.

In the back seat, Chaitanya was lying down, headphones in and eyes closed. Arjun had no idea if he was awake or not, and he did not particularly care at the moment. Right now, he was focused on making sure his attention was focused anywhere but Tanishka.

“Arjun.”

His lip twitched, but he did not move his gaze from the window.

“Arjun, look at me.”

He scoffed and flicked his wrist in a dismissive gesture, suppressing a wince when the back of his fingers smacked against the door handle. “I don’t really want to do that, right now.”

Tanishka exhaled through her nose in a way that she had been doing since they were kids, like she was exhausted and annoyed at the same time, and Arjun bit his tongue, pushing down the irrational wave of his own annoyance that rose up in his throat. “Arjun, just listen to me, please.”

He raised his eyebrows, then folded his arms across his chest and turned around to face her with the most mulish expression he could muster. “Fine. Talk.”

Tanishka huffed and looked back at the road, letting a car overtake before she spoke. “What was that, back there?”

Arjun furrowed his brow, even though he had a feeling that he knew where this conversation was going, and that he was not going to like it. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Tai.”

Tanishka scoffed, and the car lurched forward before slowing down a little, like she had accidentally pressed the accelerator. “What was the…” she smacked her lips together in contemplation— “motivation, shall we say, behind asking Mahajan to flirt with my boyfriend?”

Arjun blinked. "I didn’t ask him to flirt with Chaitanya.”

Tanishka raised an eyebrow, but did not turn to look at him. When she spoke, her soft voice was dripping with disdain. “Ah, so you’re saying he did it of his own volition.”

He rolled his eyes and relaxed into his seat, turning back to stare out the window. Some of the buildings really were ridiculously tall, he thought absently. “No,” he said, tone heavily implying exactly how stupid he thought she was being, and relished in the narrow-eyed glare that was sent his way. “I’m saying that he wasn’t flirting at all.”

Tanishka’s head whipped around. Arjun could feel her incredulous stare burning into the side of his head, and bit the inside of his cheek to hide his smile.

“… You're fucking with me right now.”

He shook his head, lips twitching. “No, I’m not.”

Hilariously, he really was not.

“Bullshit.”

“No, I swear I’m not,” he said, losing the battle against his mirth and aiming a grin at his sister. She did not smile back. “Krushna is just like that. Almost everything he says comes off as flirty, when he’s just trying to make a good impression. He doesn’t even realise that he’s coming off as flirty half the time.”

“Well then,” she said curtly, turning back to the road and gripping the steering wheel tighter as a car overtook them, “tell him he can stop trying to make a good impression on Chaitanya.”

Arjun blinked, his smile becoming wooden around the edges. He stared at Tanishka for a few seconds. “… what?”

“He’s made a fabulous enough impression, I think,” she replied, consonants becoming firmer and more clipped as her Indian accent slipped out between her pseudo-American drawl, tone covered in icy irritation. “Chaitanya was properly charmed. He doesn’t need to try anymore.”

Arjun could not stop staring. His stomach churned, and a sour taste filled his mouth, seeping into his taste buds till his disgust was the only thing he could feel. “I can’t believe this.”

“What?” She sounded so… so blasé. Like she did not care about what she was implying or what she came across as.

“What— what are you—“ he scrambled for the proper words for a few moments, disgust quickly beginning to bleed into outrage. He turned a harsh glare onto her, feeling the tiny spark of his outrage blaze into a proper angry fire when she did not even bother to give him the courtesy of her full attention, and scoffed. “Do you think— do you think Krushna’s gonna try to steal Chaitanya from you or something?”

Tanishka jerked, and the car swerved, making Arjun slam into the door before they got back onto course. “That is not—”

“Oh my God, it is!”

Tanishka whipped around and glared at him, hazel eyes identical to his flashing angrily in the glow of the headlights from the vehicles driving on the opposite side. “It is not—”

“You’re unbelievable!” Arjun threw his hands up and turned away, the sudden childish urge of not wanting to see Tanishka’s face winning before he even had the chance to fight against it. “I cannot believe you right now.”

“Arjun, it’s not what you—”

He whipped back around, hair flicking against the headrest of his seat. “Think?” he hissed, venom dripping from his words. "Please tell me, oh dear sister, what this actually is, ‘cause it sounds like you’re trying to say something really fucking rude about my best friend.”

Tanishka let out a groan between gritted teeth, but did not look away from the road, half her focus on overtaking a car in front of them. “I just don’t want Mahajan near my fiancé, alright?”

Arjun snorted. “Why, cause you think he’s gonna turn Chaitanya gay or something?”

Tanishka turned to him, a half-offended, half-incredulous expression on her face. He scoffed; as if she had the right to be outraged. “Are you serious— I do not think that!”

“Then what do you think, Tanu Tai?” he said, voice rising in volume. God, he was sick of this conversation. “M.S in Neurosurgery doesn't have courses on mind reading.”

Tanishka looked at him blankly, then turned back to the road with a harsh exhale. Her fingers flexed around the steering wheel as she took a turn into the deeper part of the city. Immediately, the traffic around them doubled, and she changed gears. “I don’t have the time for your sarcasm right now.”

“Then bloody well make time for it,” Arjun snapped, “and explain to me exactly what you’ve got against my best friend.”

Tanishka ground her teeth together, braking when a bike suddenly swerved into a U-turn in front of them. Arjun’s hand shot out to press against the dashboard so he would not slam his head into it. He glared pointedly at the side of Tanishka’s head, and she growled.

“Fine,” she snapped back. “Fine. You wanna hear what I’ve got against him?”

“Yes,” he said stubbornly.

“He’s arrogant, condescending, malicious, and straight up hateful,” she spat out. The line of her shoulders had risen, and frustration was etched into every inch of her makeup covered face. Arjun opened his mouth to interfere, but she kept on speaking, growing louder and louder with every word. “He’s hated me since the day you’ve been friends with him, and I don’t want him in my wedding simply because I dislike him. This has nothing to do with anyone’s sexual preference—”

He scoffed. “Yeah, right.”

“It’s not!” Her head shook firmly, sending carefully curled brown hair flying. Arjun sat back and raised an eyebrow, and she huffed, upper lip curling into an expression filled with loathing. “I don’t care that he’s— what, bi or pan, I don’t know, and I don’t care enough about him to find out. This isn’t about his romantic affairs, it’s about me not wanting to have someone I can’t tolerate for more than five seconds at my wedding.”

“I don’t believe you, funnily enough,” Arjun said coolly.

Tanishka breathed out through her nose and twisted the steering wheel, taking a U-turn. “You’re impossible.”

Arjun blinked and raised both eyebrows, tilting his chin down to stare her down even as his throat ached with how hard he was clenching his jaw. “I’m not the one who has a history of hating people like me and Krushna, Tanu Tai.”

Tanishka sucked in a sharp breath, hazel eyes flashing like she was about to say something equally hurtful in retaliation, but she bit down on the inside of her cheek and twisted her lips into a grimace.

“And,” Arjun continued, voice strained with something he was not in the mood for identifying, “Krushna is a lot of things, but he is not a homewrecker. He has a lot of flaws like every other person, but he hates cheating in relationships no matter who’s doing it, and I’d appreciate it if you did not insult him by even thinking of him like that.”

He turned away, pressing his forehead to the cool glass of the window, swallowing around the red-hot ball of anger in his throat. Just fifteen more minutes, he told himself, and he would be in his room, away from her. Just fifteen more minutes.

In the backseat of the car, Chaitanya slowly opened his eyes, teeth digging into his bottom lip and rolling it around.

He stared at the back of Tanishka’s seat, a tornado of thoughts swirling in his mind as he ran through the argument he had just overheard. A sick sort of feeling was starting to grow in his guts, and his skin itched, like it was an uncomfortable fit over his flesh. He swallowed, then forced himself to relax his shoulders, and pressed play on his phone.

The violin intro of a familiar song filled his ears, and he closed his eyes, trying not to think about everything that Arjun had said.

— — — — — —

It was ridiculously cold, as was expected of a winter day.

Arjun sat on the driver’s seat of his car with his knees pulled up to his chest, brown hair clipped back with hot pink barrettes that clashed horribly with the violently bright orange Camp Half Blood T-shirt he was wearing, the air conditioner turned up to twenty-seven degree Celsius and aimed right at his face. He was flipping the pages of the thick textbook he had open against the steering wheel, muttering ominously under his breath as he pushed up the wire-rimmed round glasses that had slid down his nose.

Krushna sat in the front passenger’s seat, legs folded into Swastikasana and face covered with a sheet mask, fiddling with his laptop and camera. His hair was knotted into a messy bun on top of his head, and he was dressed in a pastel blue hoodie with grey sweatpants covered in splatters of ink and paint from his many experiments in art and craft.

It had been half an hour since they had arrived at the Pune International Airport. Outside, the sky was a bleak grey and dotted with clouds, and the entrance to the airport was packed with even more people than it usually was— courtesy of the winter holidays. Children ran around, bags were dragged and trolleys were moved, yells and airport announcements came muffled through the closed windows of their car.

Krushna sighed and set the camera down, already sick of staring at the screen of his laptop. He looked up and checked the clock on the dashboard— twenty minutes past five. Fifteen minutes since Rukmini’s flight had landed, and yet he could see neither hide nor hair of his elder sister.

Beside him, Arjun let out a frustrated sound and repeatedly banged his head back against the headrest of his seat till one of the barrettes slid out of his hair and onto his shoulder. He picked it up and put it back in place with a huff, eyebrows pinched together.

“Rao,” he sighed, and Krushna raised his eyebrows in a silent question. “How much longer till she’s here? I have a test sakali, and I’m not done with my studies.”

As if on cue, the back door of the car opened, and a white tote bag was thrown onto the seat. Amid the increased volume of the people, a familiar voice rang out. “Yo, losers! Get the dikki open— I have a lot of luggage here.”

Krushna and Arjun exchanged a look and turned around with matching wide grins aimed at the woman who had poked her head in through the door, her sunglasses pushed up into her short, wavy hair to expose bright silver eyes identical to Krushna’s. A dark red smirk curved up her full lips and a pashmina scarf was wrapped around her neck, the soft cream colour matching her woollen sweater and contrasting beautifully against her dark skin.

“Hi, Ruku Tai,” the boys chorused, and the woman’s smirk widened. “Hola, mi hermanos. Arjunie, open the damn dikki. I have like, three bags here and they’re all fucking heavy.”

Ah yes, the infamous potty mouth of the infamous Rukmini Mahajan— public figure, your standard cool girl, fashion influencer, and twenty-six year old heiress of Mahajan Enterprises. Krushna sniggered, reaching behind him to slap her wrist, and yelped when he received a smack upside the head in retaliation. Arjun flicked the lock for the car boot, and Rukmini quickly piled her bags in before sliding into the back seat and slamming the door shut.

“Where’s Aai?” she asked, and Krushna simply rolled his eyes in lieu of an answer. Rukmini sighed and copied the gesture, pulling off her sunnies and sticking them to the belt loop of her trousers. “Right. Forget I asked. Which apartment are we staying at?”

Krushna shook his head. “Nope. We’re staying at the Wada.”

“Sweet. Also,” she paused to make sure that she had both their attention, then grinned. It was an extremely familiar grin, and Krushna immediately sat up straight and exchanged an anticipatory look with Arjun, who knew all too well what could ensue if Rukmini followed whatever train of thought was running through her brain.

“You didn’t tell me you made a new friend.”

Krushna groaned at the teasing waggle of her eyebrows, the frustration already building between his eyes. Gods fuck, he should have known the first thing out of his older sister’s mouth would be a teasing comment. He should have known. It was not like she was going to magically switch personalities over the two months she had spent in Spain. Really, why had he expected anything else?

“Ae bai, shanta bas ki,” he said, and both Rukmini and Arjun sniggered. Krushna pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, trying to convey as much frustration as he could in that gesture. The idiots only laughed louder, and he exhaled, lips reluctantly curling into an annoyed smile. “I’ve met Chaitanya a total of one—“ he held up the corresponding number of fingers— ”time. One. Une fois, c'est tout. You can barely call that an acquaintance, let alone a friend, Ruku Tai.”

She opened her mouth, no doubt ready to say something instigating, going off the shit-eating gleam in her eyes, but he shot her a sharp look and she subsided with a put-upon sigh.

“Ugh, you’re no fun, Krush,” she sighed. Arjun nodded and hummed sympathetically from where he was busy starting up the car, and Krushna gave both of them the most betrayed look he could muster up. A second later, they all giggled, and Arjun changed the gear, reversing out of the parking spot and heading towards the airport gates.

A second of silence, and Rukmini patted the boys on the head, one more smirk growing on her sharp features. “So,” she said, “How much trouble are we giving Tanishka?”

The boys blinked blankly at her for a second. Then, Arjun cackled, and a slow grin crept up on Krushna’s face.

Taglist: @orgasming-caterpillar @budugu @musaafir-hun-yaaron @natures-marvel @girlatreus @kanha-sakhi @krisnosura @h0bg0blin-meat @hum-suffer (lmk if you want to be added/removed)

#the almost wedding #arjun deshpande #krushna mahajan #chaitanya kulkarni #original characters #orginal story #original writing #chaptered fic #amrut writes #desi tag #desiblr #desi tumblr #romance #romcom #romance comedy #romantic comedy

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