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Asuna doesn't remember the exact moment she fell in love with him.
She remembers it was somewhere on their adventures on the lower floors that she started feeling something , but she never had a name to put to the feeling.
At the time, she chalked it up to simply being too dependent on her partner. That's all it was.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Right?
Once the time came and the two parted ways she figured this strange unnamed feeling would leave along with him.
It didn't.
This only frustrated her more but, instead of doing anything about it, she threw herself into her new guild and new position. It worked, actually. Eventually she stops even thinking about the swordsman dressed in black all together.
Until he shows up again.
And then all those feelings come bubbling up all over and she feels like she might lose her goddamn mind. Any time she sees his stupid face with his stupid messy hair falling in front of his stupid onyx eyes she becomes overwhelmingly torn between wanting to punch him that stupid face, and throwing herself at him so she can fist her hands into his shirt and sob into his shoulder and beg for him to please, please, please don’t leave her again.
She fights off these feelings for a while by being stand-offish and focusing on nothing more than clearing the game and getting home. But this only takes her so far.
She does remember the moment she realized what this feeling she had for him was.
“Hey...Kirito…” she asks abruptly. Kirito stops mid-arm stretch and gives her a side-long, apprehensive glance, “Say it was you. And you married someone...and later on you found out she had a side to her you didn’t know about. What would you think?”
She’s not sure what compelled her to ask him this; to this very day, she still wouldn’t be able to tell you.
She watches his mouth open and close like a gaping fish, the cogs in his head turning over and over. There’d probably be steam coming out of his ears if that were possible.
“I guess...I’d think that I was lucky?” It comes out as more of a hesitated question than a real answer.
She shoots him a look that causes fear to flash across his face as he waves his hands in front of him and stutters out an explanation, “I-I mean...if you marry someone, that means you already like the sides of them you have seen, doesn’t it? So if you discover a new side of her and fall in love with that too….that’s twice as much to love?”
She blinks; a nervous sweat breaks out across his forehead.
“Hmm…” after several seconds of silent gazing, she makes a soft humming sound, “That’s….weird.”
It was such a ridiculously childish answer….and so very him .. It’s that seemingly insignificant moment in time that Asuna realized she was hopelessly in love with this boy. And hell be damned if she let him slip away from her a second time.
After that, she finds reasons and excuses to spend more time with him. They grow closer again.
It all worked out in Asuna’s favor.
She tells him about all this later when they’re finally back in the real world and on their third real date.
“Hmm...you’re much more perspective than I am, that’s for sure.” is his reply as he reaches his spoon over to Asuna’s bowl to try and steal some of her ice cream - to which she swats his utensil away with her own. “I mean, having that feeling early on I get. I know I felt it too somewhere on the early floors. But realizing what it was...man, I don’t think I got to that point till--” he suddenly stops, cheeks flushing the faintest bit for a myriad of reasons, lifting his hand up to cough into his fist, “T-that one time at your place in Selmburg…”
She gives a disappointed sigh and shakes her head, “Of course, it took sex for you to realize you had feelings for me. Honestly…”
“W-wait! That..that’s not what I--” He flails his spoon around while trying to fruitlessly backtrack over his words.
But she grins and giggles.
And his heart skips a beat in that way it always does whenever she laughs like that.
And he wonders how exactly did he get so lucky.