"I knew I'd find you here."
Haruka pauses in his movements, allows himself a moment to imagine that he hadn't heard, that the voice was just a figment of his imagination, a result of years avoiding human contact and being left alone with nothing but his own thoughts.
The moment doesn't last, of course, because the voice brings a shadow with it, one that seems to dance across the bookshelves in this otherwise empty room, as if asking him to look up and see who it is.
Haruka doesn't; he doesn't need to. It may have been five years, but Nagisa isn't the type of person to let you just forget about him, even if you wanted to.
It doesn't stop Haruka from trying though, paying no mind to his visitor and continuing to focus on the row of books before him.
Not a lot of people actually come down to borrow them anymore; rampaging monsters showing up out of the blue and destroying everything in their way put a damper on people's desire to read, Haruka figures, but Nagisa doesn't need to know that, and the books find a way to require rearranging regardless, so that's what he's going to do.
"That's really rude, Haru-chan," Nagisa whines, and Haruka can all but feel the puff of his cheeks as he does so. It's far too easy to fall back into routine like this, and Haruka hates the familiarity of it all. "Not even gonna say hello?"
"Drop the '-chan'," Haruka says instead, and he can practically hear Nagisa grinning behind him.
Haruka clicks his tongue. He really shouldn't have said anything at all, just pretended Nagisa hadn't shown up in the first place. He can't deal with this right now, not after all that's happened. The fact that Nagisa even came out to find him means—no, Haruka won't let himself even think about it. He's already made the mistake of letting Nagisa in, of letting him know that Haruka remembers. He has to remind himself that he's spent the last five years of his life trying to get away from everything Nagisa and his presence represents, that he's not just going to let all that effort go to waste.
"You know I wouldn't be here if it wasn't serious, Haru-chan," Nagisa says, and Haruka's grip on his book tightens, fingers pressing against the paperback cover until his hand starts to shake. He does know, he does, and that's what bothers him the most.
"I can't—I don't do that anymore," he announces, hoping Nagisa would just for once let it go and leave, letting him resume what ounce of normalcy he's managed to attain these past few years.
Nagisa doesn't, of course; he's always been anything but obedient. It's why they put him in charge of new recruits, Haruka remembers. Ignoring what the other person wants and getting them to do what he wants instead has always been his specialty, after all.
"You can't just shrug off all your training," Nagisa chides. "We try really hard to drill all that info into your minds permanently, you know."
Haruka huffs; he can't really argue with that. Try as he might, there's no way to completely escape his past, not when it drags the rest of the world with it.
Even living as cut-off from everything as he's been all this time, there are things that find a way to barge into his consciousness, to bring him back to those times. Like on the rare occasions he can't avoid news about jaegers and the war on kaijus, his mind just can't help but flash to that pilots seat, the feel of machine, the whirr of the engines all around, layers upon layers of metal moving in sync with him—the drift.
"Once a pilot, always a pilot," Nagisa tells him. "We could really use you back down at HQ."
Haruka closes his eyes, sighs. He can feel it in the pit of his stomach, the churn of unease, of uncertainty brewing. He gives up on the rest of the books, looks down at his hands and clenches them into fists. He had known this day would come eventually; a peaceful life where alarms and announcements of the next kaiju outbreak weren't constantly being blasted into his ears could only last so long.
He should be thankful, he guesses, that he managed to spend five whole years just whiling away his time in this quiet little village out in the middle of nowhere, free from responsibility, free from worry, even finding a nice place in this library where he could be as uncommunicative as he liked, not having to answer questions like where he came from, or what he'd been doing before he washed up on shore that fateful day; he just wishes it could have gone on a little longer.
"I can't just go back there, though," he tells Nagisa. Piloting jaegers, fighting kaiju, it just not the same anymore—he's not the same anymore—not since—
"Mako-chan's been waiting for you, you know," Nagisa says, putting a hand on his shoulder.
Haruka's breath catches in his throat, like the world's stopped spinning and time has ceased to tick. He's not even sure when he turns and looks—really looks—at Nagisa for the first time since he's arrived, trying to see what's going on in those bright eyes of his.
Nagisa just smiles, like he does when he knows more than he lets on, and fishes his communicator out of his pocket. "Get the plane ready. We'll be there in an hour."
—
notes: hi so um this is my first multi-chapter fic like ever so i hope you can all be patient with me in terms of updates and stuff. inspiration for me really only comes in bits and pieces so all i have right now is mostly backstory and some idea for the main plot.
i hope you can all bear with me for now (´；ω；｀)