Disclaimer: I do not own Free! Iwatobi Swim Club or Free! Eternal Summer. Nor have I read (regrettably) the light novel. I really wish I could read High Speed...

1) Kiss

He can feel it on his skin sometimes. It comes over him like a dim dream that he can vaguely recall, sometimes with context and sometimes without. When he's alone and the lights are off, he feels that same ghostly pressure along his lips, hesitant and chaste like they had been when he was but a child. There have never been many people to touch the sensitive place, but he knows both people who have; people who did not fear him, who cared about him, who had loved him. Indeed, Nanase Haruka is no fool when he lets Makoto kiss him the first time. Nor is he illusioned when Rin takes his second and third kiss. They all happen to him and he has no power to stop it.

His first kiss is like a whisper gone wrong. He turns his head too quickly, too suddenly, in order to meet Makoto's excited words and then suddenly their lips are centimeters apart. Haruka had felt his friend's surprised intake of breath and recalls how neither of them had really pulled away. They'd stared at each other until Makoto had opened his mouth.

"Can I kiss you?"

Haruka remembers shrugging an answer, pressing his lips against his best friend's and then pulling away to continue their video game as if nothing had changed. Makoto, even at a young age, understood it enough to pretend it never happened, even if neither had ever forgotten.

Then there was Rin, firey, excitable, uncontrollable Rin, who spurns the ever impassive Haruka into action and subsequently steals his second and third kiss. The second kiss hadn't been requested like Makoto's. There was no hesitant inquiry coupled with shyly coloured cheeks. Rin was blood rushing and heart pounding and a quick, "I'm going to kiss you," and then he did. There was no questions. Haru couldn't quite recall why he'd allowed it but he knew that he hadn't hated it. Not in the slightest. He had felt warm and full of expression in an instant that left no question on his enjoyment.

But he recalls instantly making the distinction, the contrast in his mind between them. In retrospect, it wasn't fair. It was new and exciting and Rin was more entertaining than Makoto. But Makoto was kind and gentle and stable. He and Rin were so different but shared in Haruka a common love of swimming, and that seemed like enough for them. But Rin wanted more than Haruka had bargained for; affection, attention, competition; things to Haruka that were mutually exclusive.

It is different now, of course. Rin gets all those things in Sosuke and seems genuinely happy with the arrangement. They've met up a few times and Haruka has ceased his old habits of embarrassed flushes at carefully intertwined hands or compliments. Those are reserved for Makoto now, and rightly so. No one deserves his attention more than Makoto does.

So sometimes, when he feels the ghost of that kiss from long ago, he shuffles over sometimes to press his lips against the one who took his first kiss. The only man on this planet that will, he vows ever kiss. This wakes Makoto up but not always. And sometimes even Makoto will awaken with the ghost of Haru's kiss on his lips whilst Haruka savours the recent feeling of his husband's mouth, pretending to sleep in his corner of the bed.