The water is alive. Once you dive in, it will immediately bare its fangs and attack.

But there's nothing to fear. Don't resist the water. Thrust your fingers into the surface and carve an opening. Then you slide your body through that opening. Moving your arms, your head, your chest...

Sixth grader Nanase Haruka launched himself into the air and entered his natural element almost seamlessly, gliding through the water with a sense of carefree elegance that always left his younger peers gawking in awe.

"His swimming always looks so beautiful," sighed fifth-grader Ryuugazaki Rei, having never seen a more graceful form in his eleven-year-old life. Beside him, his classmate, Hazuki Nagisa nodded with a grin.

"Yep, like a dolphin!" he said cheerfully, coaxing a soft chuckle out of Rei, who then turned his attention to the swimmer approaching his block. Rei pressed Stop on his watch and told the girl below her time.

A few more turns and Haruka left the pool, only for another swimmer to take his place, a boy Nagisa had never seen before. He launched forward energetically and dove in with a great splash. Nagisa turned to Rei in excitement.

"Who's that, Ryuugazaki-kun?" he asked, nudging his friend's elbow until Rei's gaze turned to him, then followed Nagisa's pointed finger to the newcomer in the water.

"I believe his name is Matsuoka," replied Rei, who overheard the stranger's introduction as he walked past to grab a kickboard from the equipment cart.

"I wanna talk to him!" bounced Nagisa.

"Suit yourself," came Rei's reply, who had agreed to time a few more swimmers and so could not budge from his place, not even for Nagisa's sake. Well… not unless it was an emergency. He turned his eyes to his stopwatch again while Nagisa scampered off, to wait for the stranger by the block.

Some time later, Nagisa and Matsuoka left that lane and lined up next to Haruka.

"You're going to race, Nanase-kun, and I'm gonna time you to see who's faster!" Rei heard Nagisa say, so he turned his head towards them to watch them swim. Matsuoka snapped his goggles into place. As he and Haruka curled into position, Nagisa asked for and received a stopwatch from another swimmer to record their times.

"Ready… Set… Go!"

Nagisa and Rei watched as they dived in, soon caught in a heated race, shooting towards the other side and back like human torpedoes. It was a close call, very close, but in the end, Haruka's hand touched the wall first.

"Who was it?!" cried Matsuoka from below. Nagisa pointed to Haru, who proceeded to clamber out of the pool, plucking the stopwatch out of Nagisa's hand. Nagisa let him.

"You were so cool, Nanase-kun!" he breathed in awe. "I wanna swim like you…!"

"Your swimming was beautiful, Nanase-senpai!" agreed Rei from a lane away.

Haru merely hummed, the stopwatch still in his hands. Nagisa and Rei thought the other boy would follow, but he chose to linger by the lane rope, flashing a congenial smile at the others standing together. Haruka regarded him with a stern expression. Rei and Nagisa were obviously unfamiliar with him, but Haru had seen him before at several swim meets, and as of yesterday, they were in the same class at Iwatobi Elementary School, too. Even without the compulsory introductions on his first day, Haruka would have remembered the boy's name, carved into his memory by sheer annoyance more than anything else. Matsuoka… Matsuoka Rin.

"Well, what was your time for the hundred meter?"

Haruka returned the stopwatch to Nagisa, then left the block for the lane Rei was timing. Nagisa peered down at the screen.

"He reset it," he said wide-eyed. Haru could hear Rin scoff but said nothing, letting his actions speak loud and clear instead, in a way Haru never could.

That's right, I don't care about swimming faster times, he thought as he once again stepped upon the starting block of his choice and assumed his stance once more. All I want is to feel the water. With my skin, my eyes, my soul... To never doubt what it makes me feel. To believe in myself.

Don't resist the water. Welcome it.

We accept one another.

Yeah... There was some funky stuff going through my head back then, mused Nanase Haruka four years later, sitting in the bathtub of an empty house with his hand reached out in absolute reverie. He tensed his fingers and made a languid grasp at nothing, as if to mock that pure, passionate younger self that had fallen through the cracks of time and was lost, perhaps, forever.

There was an old saying his late grandmother taught him. When you're ten, they call you a prodigy. When you're fifteen, they call you a genius. Once you hit twenty, you're just an ordinary person.

About three more years until I'm ordinary, thought Haru as he closed his eyes and tilted his head back until he slipped to the bottom of the tub, his breath bubbling away in pearls.

Man... I can't wait to be ordinary.

Haruka stayed in the water for a long, long time, wishing it would never turn cold enough to threaten him with an actual illness instead of a feigned one. A good hour or so had passed since the start of the opening ceremony at Iwatobi High School, but being averse to all boring formalities, he quickly decided to call in sick and successfully exempted himself from attending. It hardly mattered what class he would be in or who his homeroom teacher would be, anyway – Matsuoka Rin was long gone and Haru had no other friends his own age, having been a solitary creature for as long as he could remember. With no family or peers around to nag him, the bathtub upstairs held an allurement that no amount of grandiose speeches and tedious assemblies could ever hope to contend with.

He measured his time by the darkening shades of his fingernails and tended to draw the line at "obviously purple," at which point the water had become unbearably cold to a body doomed to sitting still. Haru climbed out with little reluctance yet infinite regret, his swimsuit clinging like a second skin that he detested to pick and peel. On it stayed, dried roughly with a towel so Haru could leave for his bed, where he laid down in a crumpled heap. On his writing desk, his phone seemed to beep every few minutes with a new message – Haru counted seven until the constant buzzing of vibrate wore off. Someone must have been quite desperate to bother him. That's what every instance of communication felt like on the damn thing. He agreed to have it for emergencies – that was his original condition, but messages could hardly be considered a cause for alarm. If they had time to type in all that, they could have just called instead. Haru sighed and pulled the blanket over his head, protesting even the unobtrusive dimness of a room where every blind was drawn, in a vast, empty house where every door was locked.

While the weather was unfavorable to swim in the ocean, Haruka passed his time doing homework and chores, sitting in the bathtub, or wasting away in sleep with little variance to distinguish one day from another, weeks from months, until his life formed into clear-cut patterns of freedom in the water and passive confinement at school and at home. Haru did sometimes prop his arms on the windowsill, letting his gaze wander along the white stone stairs to the Misagozaki shrine, but the urge to chase what his eyes could consume in one lazy glance never came. His sole object of desire remained the water, where loneliness transformed into blissful independence, and "Why don't you try to make friends?" became "No one I know compares to this." And from his soul, it was true – concepts like the 'best friend' or 'soul mate' his peers always talked of in loud and important voices had stayed an intangible myth to Haruka. He doubted that any one person could ever learn to navigate the maze of his mind when he said so little and kept to himself so much, and it seemed like an unreasonable demand to be understood without explanation, to be accepted without any desire to fix him, and to not be entirely forgotten or reproached whenever he went off to do as he would, which was to simply exist.

And so he existed under the covers for a few hours, neither asleep nor awake, and what eventually roused him was the doorbell, chiming ten times in perfect tempo. Go away. I don't care. Go away, he pleaded silently, hands wringing the sheets, but then the phone started ringing too, and Haruka was suddenly obliged to care, bound by his promise to his parents to answer every call and be accountable, or else give up "wasting away" in this small town and move in with them as he should have two years ago. He was not ready to leave the ocean, his one constant through seventeen years of solitude. He picked up the phone.

"Hello."

"Haruka-senpai..! Thank goodness! It's Rei, Ryuugazaki Rei? Let us in, Haruka-senpai!"

"…Oh."

Haruka had no one but himself to blame. Had he spared one minute to look at his unread messages – twelve in total –, he would have realized that Rei, who attended all formal school events without fail, and was in general prone to officiousness, had been frantically trying to reach him the moment the opening ceremony had ended to gauge the severity of his pretend illness. Haru's hand went limp, until the phone slipped back onto the desk with a small thud. He sighed as he slowly dragged himself to the ground floor, where he unlocked the door and pulled it open just enough to stick his head outside. It was there that the troubling discrepancy between "Rei" and "us" was finally resolved in realizing he had two guests instead of one. Having failed to contact him, Rei decided to seek Nagisa's advice, and they soon agreed that a visit to dispel their apprehensions would probably do no harm.

"You're alive!" Nagisa greeted him, grinning from ear to ear. "Why don't you ever check your phone, Haru-chan?"

"We had been informed by the faculty counselor of Iwatobi High School that you were ill, Haruka-senpai," explained Rei. "So we thought we would visit you and brought you this…" he continued as Nagisa lifted his bag, from which Rei produced a food container, holding it out for Haruka to take. "Chicken noodle soup."

"The best remedy of all!" added Nagisa. Haruka stared blankly in response, wondering why no one ever remembered that he preferred mackerel to anything else. The idea annoyed him more than the fact that Rei obviously inquired after him at the assembly – or how he was able to inquire when Haru and the others had never attended school together in the first place.

"Well, aren't you gonna let us in, Haru-chan? It's cold out here, you know..!" whined Nagisa. Haruka's frame was still wedged firmly between themselves and the warmth within, and when he moved to the side at last, he pulled the door open just barely enough for the others to squeeze through. Nagisa promptly slipped past him with the unconcerned ease of a teenager who felt at home wherever he went, and after a quick bow to his host, Rei followed him into the living room. Haru himself stood by the door for a moment longer, wondering where he had lost control of the situation, and worse, where it might be headed. The soup was so hot it burned his palm through the plastic. He dragged the door shut.

By the time Haru appeared in the living room, Nagisa and Rei had settled down on the bare floor by the table and were peering up at him as if waiting for or downright expecting something. Haruka's stare was deadpan. Nagisa's smile widened.

"Do you want tea?" muttered Haru, obviously reluctant to host them.

"Yes, please, Haru-chan!" chirruped Nagisa.

"If it's not too inconvenient, Haruka-senpai..." said Rei in a low voice.

"…There are pillows in the bottom cabinet," sighed Haruka, disappearing into the kitchen with the container. The familiar creak of cabinet doors sliding on their hinges and the slight shuffle that followed informed him that they had found his set of purple pillows, which hadn't seen much use in months.

"You really should keep them where we can see them, Haru-chan. It's almost like you don't like guests coming to your house," he heard Nagisa say. I don't, thought Haru, but he pursed his lips and drowned his annoyance in the kettle. Three cups were soon procured from the back of the cupboard and slipped onto a tray, along with three bowls and three sets of chopsticks, if only to give the impression that was expected of him. Haruka had no desire to eat, but he figured that such things were better not said out loud. Nagging would inevitably follow and nagging was tiresome.

"Here," he said, setting everything down on the table in easy reach along with the container, which had since been opened and a ladle dipped into that luscious swamp of chicken breast and udon. He then pulled out a pillow for himself and joined them, sinking to the floor with his arms folded over his knees. Nagisa immediately took a bowl, filling it to the brim with gleaming eyes. Rei shook his head, but said nothing, and took one of the cups.

"You look remarkably well, Haruka-senpai," he began, flashing the other a tentative smile. Haru glared at him from behind the wall of his arms.

"I'm not sick. I just called in sick," he said, his tone defensive and sharp. Rei balked.

"B-But Haruka-senpai, an opening assembly is a compulsory school event—"

"I don't care."

"Calling in sick though just so you wouldn't have to go, really, Haru-chan?" teased Nagisa, though the grin on his face was proof enough that he could relate, and did not wish to quarrel for long. Indeed, he was soon too busy stuffing his mouth to attempt anything of the sort.

"You shouldn't neglect your responsibilities as a student, Haruka-senpai," said Rei, and after shooting Nagisa a reprimanding glare (mostly for slurping his noodles too messily), he continued to say, "But fear not, Haruka-senpai, for the moment I discerned you were not present, I made special care to listen to the announcement for second-year students in your place! You shall be in Class One this year and you will have a new homeroom teacher as well. She has recently transferred to Iwatobi High School to teach classical literature… her name is Amakata Miho-sensei, I believe."

"Fomfing lige dhat," nodded Nagisa, earning another annoyed glance from Rei. He swallowed, almost straining his neck to get the better of a piece of chicken he was working on. "But never mind that now, there are more important things to discuss," he carried on, fixing his eyes intently on Haruka. "Haru-chan, is there a chance we could swim together again? Imagine if we swam in a relay to represent Iwatobi, wouldn't that be great?"

"What are you talking about," replied Haru, his expression guarded. "You don't even attend the same school."

"That's what you think, Haru-chan!" came the cheerful answer, accentuated by a stern cough from Rei.

"Had you attended the opening assembly, Haruka-senpai, you would have noticed that both Nagisa-kun and I have enrolled in Iwatobi High School."

"Yep! It was such a bother to be apart from you for so long, and now we get to go to the same school! Well, what do you say, Haru-chan?"

Haru said nothing at first, his every joint frozen stiff with discomfort. They had only run into each other a few times since the relay, and whenever they did, Haruka seldom talked about himself. For all Nagisa knew, he could have won a dozen tournaments in the meantime… and perhaps he would have, had it not been for that one meeting with Rin three years ago.

"I quit swimming competitively," he owned, his eyes boring into the floor. No passage of time could prepare him for their looks of disappointment, let alone the verbal avalanche that followed.

"Whaaat?!" cried Nagisa, his shock so great he had to set his bowl down. "Why'd you quit?! I was all excited about getting to swim with you again in high school!"

"Me too, Haruka-senpai!" joined in Rei, almost pleading. "I spent most of this week reviewing all the latest theories about swimming! Nagisa-kun and I even considered asking you to come with us so we could buy new swimsuits together..!"

"We are not little kids anymore," snapped Haru. "Things aren't the way they used to be."

"Haru-chan…" breathed Nagisa, his voice tender with selfish concern, and his eyes large with pleas for a real explanation that Haru felt unable to provide. Having to argue always drained him to the core. If any part of his conduct had ever given him grief, it was the constant demands of others to justify it.

"Haruka-senpai.." began Rei, his voice cautious, "Is there any other reason for your objecting to the idea?"

Stop prying, said the way Haru turned his head, his face dulled to a blank page as his resistance faded into silent passivity. Rei's fingers curled into an idle fist, the urge to pursue the issue strong, yet slowly crumbling to pieces at that veil of resigned sadness over Haruka's eyes that neither of them knew how to pierce. He sighed. Nagisa forced a weak smile.

"Come on, Haru-chan..!" he pleaded, lacing hope with easy-going playfulness. "You do like water, don't you?"

"Sure," replied Haru, no longer looking at anyone or anything in particular.

"Well then, let's found a hot springs club instead! What do you say?"

"I am fairly certain that a hot springs club would not be endorsed by any school committee, Nagisa-kun," replied Rei automatically. Nagisa chuckled despite himself.

"You really have no imagination, do you, Rei-chan?"

"Nagisa-kun..!"

After all this time, they are still the same, Haruka thought to himself, his heart stale with an emptiness their voices could not reach, a negative space that his friends could not fill. He listened to their affectionate bickering for a while longer, but the more it dragged on, the further Haru had withdrawn into his shell, until Rei became keenly conscious of their having overstayed their welcome. He gave Nagisa's side a gentle nudge.

"Well, we'll be leaving now, Haruka-senpai," he said pointedly as he rose to his feet. Nagisa blinked, but soon followed suit, and Haru took that as his cue to fetch the lid of the container from the kitchen.

"No, no, it's fine, Haru-chan..!" protested Nagisa, thrusting the shopping bag at Rei in a sloppy attempt to hide it. "Please eat it, it's yours. Sorry I ate so much of it…"

"That's fine," replied Haru, his voice perfectly bland. He dropped the lid on the table, then led them to the door, grabbing his keys to unlock it again. Nagisa and Rei slipped out amid hushed goodbyes that Haru returned with a nod, holding the door in obvious wait for the very moment he could close it. Nagisa hesitated.

"You are coming tomorrow, right, Haru-chan?" was his last valiant attempt. Haru paused. As little as he cared about first day attendance, the lie had been exposed, and there was no excuse not to go. He gave Nagisa a half-hearted nod that the other barely noticed, grabbing Haru's hand to squeeze it in his. "Promise you'll come! We could meet for lunch…!"

"That sounds like a wonderful idea," said Rei, flashing a tentative smile at both of them. "We could meet on the roof. The view must be so beautiful and we would be seeing it for the first time… Would you accompany us, Haruka-senpai?"

Haru pursed his lips in defiance, to no avail. Between those childish faces brimming with hope, there was simply no refuge for him.

"Fine," he sighed, closing his eyes in defeat. Nagisa's laughter rang thoroughly relieved.

"It's settled then! See you tomorrow, Haru-chan!" he cried as he practically skipped down the path in triumph with an exasperated Rei in tow, ignoring his cries of Wait up, Nagisa-kun…! And no running on the stairs!

Haru stood there for a while longer, as if the drift of those familiar voices had anchored him to the open door, but once even their echoes ebbed away, the sudden absence of life that filled his house, only to die in the blink of an eye stunned Haruka greater still. Silence fell upon him like a blow to the head and he slowly retreated inside, locking the door behind him for good.

The soup had grown lukewarm since, but its smell had pervaded the living room so entirely that Haru soon found himself slipping to the floor to gather the container in his arm, drawing clump after clump of cooled noodles from the golden liquid with his chopsticks. He stuffed them inside his mouth with a restless urgency, as though the void inside of him had become one resonant scream of hunger.

He ate the whole thing, down to the last strand of udon and the smallest shred of chicken breast, leaving nothing but some residue of broth on the bottom. He furrowed his brow and shoved the container away in shame. It wasn't even that good, he angrily told himself… so why did he eat it all?

By the time Haru crawled back into bed, his too-full stomach felt like molten lead, spreading slowly to his limbs until they grew heavy with entropy. It was the same oppressive emptiness of every night, yet for the first time in a long while, some tiny, deeply buried part of him stirred like a wounded animal, crying out for something Haruka could not even fathom, let alone identify.

He lay awake all night staring at the ceiling. What was he missing?

.

. .

Was it Rin. . .?

Nagisa might have made a show of being cheerful, but the further they got from the house, the more his steps lost their spring, until both he and Rei stopped at the bottom of the stone stairs, looking back with concern and disappointment. Having spent their week-long holiday together, and each indulging to some extent in the possibility of a miraculous transformation from one meeting to the next, they had secretly hoped to find Haruka more lively, or at the very least, not as desolate as he appeared in the door, pale and tired and lonesome as ever.

"Rei-chan… Can I come over tonight?" asked Nagisa, his voice low and strange. Rei's face had hardened the more he stared at Haruka's house in the distance, but once he turned his head to look at Nagisa, his features softened almost instantly.

"You may, Nagisa-kun…" he replied, then added with a hint of sternness, "but only if you pack and bring your schoolbag. I will not be held responsible for your arriving late to school on your first day!"

Nagisa let out a weak chuckle, eyes gleaming in the light.

"Wonderful, caring Rei-chan," he whispered, and it was Rei's turn to laugh and flush. He shook his head, then walked on with Nagisa towards the nearest train station, both of them uncharacteristically quiet on the way.

A few hours later, just after dinner, Nagisa donned his high school uniform for the first time since the opening ceremony, then gave himself a good look in the mirror, fancying himself the spitting image of a young adult who had things to do and places to be, the place being Rei's apartment nearby, and the things to be decided on the spot like always. Nagisa packed his school bag extra carefully not to give Rei any cause for regret, quickly snuck some bread rolls from the kitchen for next day's lunch, then hurried outside, so solemn and out of place in his late evening march that passersby could not help but pause and marvel at such a determined, serious young man. Nagisa's face only brightened once Rei opened the door, already dressed in butterfly pajamas. Nagisa scurried inside, sprawling onto the bed with his schoolbag beside him.

"Thank you, Rei-chan," he said with a grin. Rei shook his head softly.

They stayed up well past their usual time, engaged in no more than idle chitchat cautiously circling around its true object, which each was reluctant to address, yet hoped to resolve while they were still awake. The conversation was slowly but surely dying, each pause longer than the last, until Nagisa forced a yawn and dropped his head on Rei's shoulder. He took a deep breath to strengthen his resolve. It was now or never.

"Rei-chan," he began, voice cautious, "do you think Haru-chan will keep his promise?"

"A promise is a promise, Nagisa-kun," replied Rei. "I'm sure he will come."

"What do you think happened to him that he doesn't swim competitively anymore?" Nagisa pressed on, unwilling to believe that Haru-chan had simply grown up while they themselves had hardly changed.

"I don't know," sighed Rei. "I suppose.. perhaps he lost interest after Rin-senpai left. I don't believe he had been especially competitive before that time, and he seemed to take Rin-senpai's leave very hard."

Nagisa squinted, his heart thumping with faraway echoes of Rin-chan's laugh as he waved goodbye to them, never to be seen again.

"I cried when he left," he whispered. "We both did, do you remember? Haru-chan didn't cry at all, but I bet he felt worse than we did. I think Rin-chan was his only friend in class..."

"He's always been alone, it seems," said Rei, his blood running cold. "I should have kept in touch with him better. The last time we met, I confirmed his address and even asked for his phone number, and yet I haven't sent him a message or visited him until today…"

"Don't blame yourself, Rei-chan," pleaded Nagisa, giving Rei's arm a squeeze. "Haru-chan doesn't need you…"

"That's not a very nice thing to say," muttered Rei, his brow furrowed. Nagisa blinked.

"I didn't mean it that way! I meant that what Haru-chan needs isn't you or me. What Haru-chan really needs is someone steady in his life!"

"Someone steady…? You mean—"

"Haru-chan needs a soul mate!" cried Nagisa, smacking his fist against the palm of his hand. "He needs to make more friends, especially in class so he would see them everyday. Maybe if he found somebody nice, he would cheer up and swim in a relay again!"

"I think your cause and effect are rather disjointed, Nagisa-kun," replied Rei, unable to resist logical fallacies, but then adding with more enthusiasm, "But you are absolutely right. Haruka-senpai needs to broaden his horizons and open up his heart to the beauty of close, intimate companionship. Perhaps… perhaps…"

"Perhaps..?" urged Nagisa, his eyes wide.

"Perhaps we could offer our guidance. We may only be his lowerclassmen, but I believe we possess more experience in the field of interpersonal relationships than Haruka-senpai."

"Whatever gave you that idea?" laughed Nagisa. "So it's settled! We'll bug him every day until he makes a friend in class!"

"Not exactly what I had in mind, but an acceptable compromise," mused Rei. "Very well, Nagisa-kun. Tomorrow we shall commence Operation: Companions for Haruka-senpai!"

"That's the spirit, Rei-chan!" cheered Nagisa, pouncing Rei in a hug that soon had them rolling about in bed. "Don't worry Haru-chan!" he cried with glee as Rei flailed around in his grasp, "We'll get you a soul mate if it's the last thing we do…!"

"If you don't get off me, Nagisa-kun, I promise you that this is the last thing you will do!"

"Awww, Rei-chaaan..!"