Notes: Post-S, rather fluffy Haruka/Michiru ficlet.
They stop for a while beside a winding road leading up into the mountains beyond the edge of the city, and look out across it in silence together, the glowing network of lights that they've decided isn't for them right now. In the inch of space between them is the unspoken relief that it's over, and the uneasy question of how long that will last.
Haruka takes a deep breath of the clean, cool air, and is amazed at how easy it is to breathe, how light she feels. The worry that's felt like it's trying to crush her for months now has finally let go.
Michiru puts a light hand on her arm, fingers curling against her shirt, and Haruka shakes off her surprise, turns, smiles.
"Shall we go?" Michiru asks.
"Yeah," Haruka says. "Yeah, let's."
They haven't made any kind of a plan, and neither of them mentions that. The pull of away was so strong. Maybe even for Michiru too. Where to seemed less important.
They drive west, on small roads.
It's only when they've booked themselves into a hotel, miles from anywhere, that talking about where they're going begins to seem like a possibility. But by then it's late, and they're tired, and it really hasn't been that long since the world almost ended. When Michiru kisses her Haruka stops even considering the question; when and where are too abstract, now is concrete and she doesn't want it to end.
"You've come such a long way," Michiru says, slides her fingers through Haruka's hair. "Don't you think?"
"We," Haruka mumbles sleepily.
"Hmm?"
"We've come a long way," she says, a little bit more clearly, but not much, because there hasn't been a single bit of coffee in her day so far. "What's this about?"
"Just thinking out loud," Michiru says mildly, and Haruka knows that she doesn't have the energy to push for the whole story this early in the day. She'll save it.
"Please tell me there's room service," she manages instead, and Michiru just laughs and stretches out a warm cup like a peace-offering.
Haruka accepts with, she thinks, remarkably good grace.
"What do we do now?" she asks, hours later, sitting on the hotel's terrace and basking in the increasingly warm sunlight.
"That depends on what you mean," Michiru teases, raises an eyebrow. "I was thinking of taking a walk."
"No I mean. The other thing."
"Anything you like. Everything we've never had time for. What have you been waiting to do?"
Be with you, Haruka thinks and can't say. At the next table a group of older women are laughing together, well within earshot.
"Travel," she says instead.
She's always wanted to run and run, so fast that she became the wind. She's always wanted to go further and higher. It used to be running away. Maybe it still is, but she likes to think that it's running just for the pleasure of it. She wants to run with Michiru beside her, across the whole world.
Michiru just says, "I was thinking about America."
Of course she was. Haruka runs faster and Michiru is still a step ahead.
Haruka laughs, and hopes that Michiru can maybe see how much she loves her from her face alone. "Perfect."
"But what did you mean this morning?" she asks over tea, the two of them sitting tired and relaxed on the broad bed, legs curled under them, the chairs and table by the window ignored.
"I used to think," Michiru says, and hesitates. "I used to think that you'd run from me as soon as we didn't have a job to do together. You seemed so..." she shrugs.
Haruka knows what she means: she seemed scared, because she was. She was terrified, and she only used to know one way of dealing with terror. But she wasn't terrified of Michiru.
"Idiot," she says.
"That was in the very beginning," Michiru says softly. "I didn't think- not after."
Haruka reaches out and brushes Michiru's hair back from her cheek, lets her hand linger.
"But I remembered it today," Michiru adds. "It's true, you know, you have come a long way. Further than me."
"It's not a race," Haruka says. She means it to be affectionately teasing. But it's true, isn't it? They can race everyone else, but never each other. They can't help but match each other's pace.
And Michiru has come just as far as she has, whatever she says. Maybe she doesn't know how scared she used to look; maybe she thinks it doesn't show.
It just makes Haruka want to hold her.
There's a lot of affection that she's been holding pushed under the surface, she thinks, and wants to laugh at herself.
She takes just long enough to lift Michiru's cup out of her hands and put it aside, and then they're collapsed together on the bed, laughing and kissing and laughing again.
Haruka takes the window seat and sits and stares out over the vanishing landscape. She's never been on a commercial flight before, never left the country. Where would she have got the money from, before? And when would she have found the time, after?
She thinks that the endless sprawl of buildings is Tokyo, but it might be somewhere completely different; she's cut loose from the ground and from her bearings, higher than she's ever flown before. This isn't cruising in a helicopter, low enough to see in through the windows of highrise buildings.
Somewhere down there a home might be waiting for them, not wood or stone but maybe a group of people; a place where they're needed. When they're called they'll have to take the shortest road to get there, but for now they can take whatever long and twisting roads they like away from it and know that it's still there, waiting.
She finds the thought more comforting than she expected, both parts, the freedom and the sense of belonging.
Michiru takes her hand, and the plane banks, pulls away over the ocean, and all they can see is the sky.
[fin]