They fight the bathtub with long legs and curling toes, and in the end they're far too weary to turn the taps back on, so they sit with a shared feeling of lukewarm satisfaction lapping against their chests. And it's not like these moments are intended to bring them any closer physically – they've just grown since the prepubescent age of twelve.
"It wouldn't take much more for the water to be up to our shoulders," He muses, arms cradling the sides of the tube like they want to be cradling something else. Someone else. Haruka breathes out heavily. "I bet that's what you're thinking."
Vaguely, he still remembers when this body of water could handle them both. Handle their shoulders too. When what would now be in the place of knees were once water guns, and the sharp point of ankles in thighs were that of toy soldiers in water.
His knees come up as his head sinks down and careful not to take in any water he says; "Saving on the water bill."
"Ah,"
While Makoto may have the upper hand in size, he still refuses to give up his hand-me-down smile which is really two sizes too big for him. The one he's giving him right now. He took it from his Mother, which she took from her father, and Haruka knows it's her, because he's seen her wear it handing them their lunches, or when Makoto gives his lunch to Ren, 'because Big-Brothers food always tastes better.' (He's seen it at times he thinks he really shouldn't have too, like when Makoto's Dad on last years Christmas Do decided in a drunken haze they should renew their wedding vows. He's not too sure what that means about them just yet.) He tries to bring his full attention to the crack in the tile above the curve of Makoto's shoulder, but he only manages to scrap at least two thirds of it along with his eyes.
Silence paints itself like a new coat of skin over his lips and brings down the corners with the weight of it. It dose much the same to his eyelids too. He felt the same as when they had masked over the crack the first time, and then again a second. The first was before his parents moved out of town, and bonding with Dad was more than one liners of "Have you been eating properly?" over the phone. Makoto was there for the second, and Nagisa was merely a name of a girl in their primary school. They both walked paint through the hallway and Makoto apologised twice to Haruka's parents, once with damp eyes and once without but neither of them minded much, and Haruka's Grandmother offered him a smile and a small kindness encased by sugar cradled in her coarse hand. He sits up and shivers when the water runs off his chest and settles with his back against the tub again.
Haruka finds his eyes caught in the spaces between his friends fingers, and a tugging in his chest urges him to fill them like Makoto fills the silence in his bathroom.
"Did your Mum call you today?" He asks.
"Yes," Haruka replies with the same monotone repetition as he would with what he eat that night, and what he will eat again tomorrow. "She's doing well."
Makoto nods and takes off again as his voice bounces off the walls and their cracks with another story that Haruka is listening to, but, not really. Just, he has bigger concerns than this trivial chatter, better questions to be answered like why does Makoto have creases in his forehead when they should be the ones he sees all too often around his eyes, one's caving in on one another, smothering unspoken words of care and compassion between the folds. And why does he feel like he should correct himself and say no, they're not too often at all.