"You need to get your head out of your fucking ass, Nanase."
The air between Haruka and Sousuke was thick with almost tangible tension in their silent standoff from opposite sides of Haruka's table.
"Well, I don't think that's altogether reasonable, Sousuke." Makoto said from beside the Samezuka swimmer.
"Tell Rin to get his head out of his first," Haruka retorted flatly. Really, damn Makoto and his mothering tendencies. All he had wanted to do was shut himself away and just… not deal with anything for a while. Even water, his eternal constant, when he'd tried to swim had seemed too choking, too tinted with shades of crimson-carmine, and tanging of blood as it'd rushed into his lungs and threatened to choke him.
But Makoto had shown up at his doorstep the third week he'd missed joint practice with his weird relationship-thing guy in two, and refused to leave.
Sousuke's insistence that he'd break the door down if Haruka didn't open it, and the latter's complete belief that he would, in fact do such a thing was a large part of why they were there today, sitting across from Haruka and giving him some sort of couple intervention or something.
"Well, I would, but he'd current moping like a loser with a broken heart in Australia,' Sousuke growled back, and the shock dully registered. So Rin left. Without even saying goodbye.
"You know he misses you a lot, Haru," Makoto said gently, and, honestly, Haruka sometimes wished he could have fallen for the green-eyed boy, because that would have made things just so much easier.
"I'll say he does, you broke his fucking heart."
The Iwatobi swimmer winced involuntarily, even as Makoto laid a warning hand on his partner. "Sousuke…"
As the Samezuka swimmer lapsed into sullen silence, Makoto turned to Haruka with a now-lets-be-reasonable face. "But you guys are obviously very unhappy without each other now. So what I'm saying is, have you ever considered swimming professionally, Haru?"
"No," he replied, too quickly, too heatedly. "I've told you I want to swim because I love the water, and sharing it with you guys."
"Oh yeah?" Sousuke, sitting across from them, mocked, "The why exactly have you been missing practice for the past three weeks?"
That threw Haruka.
"It's not the same without him, is it?" he continued with his relentless interrogation at Haruka's wide-eyed silence. "Isn't there something bigger he shows you?"
Apparently satisfied at the Iwatobi swimmer's speechlessness, the brunet shot Makoto a look, dusting off his hands as if to say my work here is done.
"And here."
As his guests got up to leave, Makoto giving Haruka one of those kind smiles that said I'm happy for you, Sousuke threw a pamphlet onto the table.
"Start training now, there will be scouts there."
Haruka sat there for a long time after they'd left, as stunned as if someone had hit him in the head with a fish, fingers absently tracing the edge of the pamphlet that advertised 36th Iwatobi Swim Meet!
The closest Nanase Haruka had ever come to this sort of nervousness was when his relay team had made it to nationals. But even that excruciating moment when they had walked the twenty meters from the changing rooms to the pool didn't come close to the he could feel butterflies swooping in his stomach now as he stepped onto the starting block. One step, and he recalled in a dizzying whirlwind of color, the endless training, the countless meetings with important-looking, English-speaking officials, and the cheers of his friends, standing like pillars of solidarity by his side.
The were somewhere in the crowd, too, today, but all the colorful banners, the milling crowd and the heavy expectations that still chafed were lost in a blur as his eyes sought out one person in the rank of swimsuits against the backdrop of the biggest pool he'd ever seen.
An Olympic-sized pool.
His vision came to rest on a maroon-haired boy, his built still so familiar despite the intervening five years that had made his memories and the photographs a bit fuzzy around the edges.
Sensing Haruka's stare on his back, Rin turned, and the look on his face was worth everything, worth the fights, worth the drudge of training and training and training to get here. The fire that lit in Rin's eyes after he'd stared back to his satisfaction was what Haruka remembered most clearly, more than his face or voice. And he knew what that look meant, as they took their positions on their respective starting blocks, angled just that little bit towards each other, as the starting gun fired and it was just the two of them and the water again.
Let's swim together again, Nanase.