Chapter Text
Rin has always known it- known it like the indescribable feeling that crawls over his skin and settles in his bones just before a thunderstorm; or the way he knows each fine nuance of how the clear, calm blue of Samezuka's Olympic-sized pool will yield, genuflect at his cleaving touch; or the way he knows that the sun shines and the rain falls and a million other things that he's lived with so long that they've wormed their way into the permanence of his subconscious.
It is raining when he starts thinking, really thinking about it, oddly enough. Thunder streaks across the leaden sky as if the equivocal divinity above has decided to exact all its vengeance at once, and Rin stretches out from where he's leaning back in one of the window-settees in his academy's common room, listening to the satisfying snap of long-cramped joints pop.
"So we didn't get to go running, after all," he remarks to Sousuke, who is currently on the brink of sleep at the opposite end of the settee, mainly to fuck his nap up. "Bummer."
"Hmmm," comes the noncommittal reply, furthering the discussion clearly not on Sousuke's priority list. So Rin lets up, the urge to reach further, to push and push and pushthe other out of their comfort zone only possessing him with one person (only everwith one person) and the conversation dies down.
"Not interested in telling them the story of how something slimy grabbed your foot one time in the pool?"
Sousuke's voice, pitched barely above a sleepy rasp, comes to him after a beat.
Rin lets escape a yawn, eyes flicking lazily over to where most of his companions, led predictably by Momotarou, were playing some sort of spooky-storytelling game.
"No thank you," he waves his hand dismissively. The other boy just quirks an eyebrow.
"Don't tell me that Matsuoka Rin, erstwhile owner of the lamest spider-on-a-stick pranks in history, has lost his taste for horror."
Rin scowls at his friend, scrubbing a hand through his hair and glancing away.
"This one time in Australia, Russell and Lori did a Hallowe'en thing for me, and I totally freaked. So that cured me of any obsession I ever had with spookiness," he mutters, a faint blush working its way up his cheeks.
Sousuke doesn't reply, and they sit in silence for a bit, before the monotone thud of rain lulls his customary brusqueness enough to let the question slip. "Did you... think about any of us back there?"
And Rin doesn't reply to that, not for a while, because what does Sousuke fucking think.
And what words can Rin fucking use to describe the ache that throbbed in his chest when he flicked through the Sano-Iwatobi scrapbook he'd made, the slow, paralysing ice that inhibited his fingers as soon as they put pen to paper.
"What do you fucking think? Not like I needed company to climb Ayers Rock, or anything," he flashes a tight, sharp-toothed grin, hoping Sousuke will just drop it there.
"And whose fault is it that I never had any idea?" his friend half-mutters, even quieter than usual. The bitterness his impassivity hides so well, though, comes through to Rin clear as a bell. And perhaps Sousuke, damn him, senses something of his friend's ill-concealed discomfort, because he suddenly smirks. "Goodness knows you were up to some much more interesting activities down under, if you know what I mean."
"Yeah, that's something your lonely bed and your right hand would pay to witness," Rin snarks back, biting out a somewhat relieved laugh at the blatant change of subject. He throws his head back, eyes tracing the pattern of cemented cracks spiderwebbing across the ceiling. Reminiscent of the fucking face he put on to the world.
And god fuck him, it had always been like that. Chinks in his iron-steel-titanium-plated armor, wormed into and filled by the swish of long, silken hair, the softness of wandering hands, and the persistent, acrid fragrance of cheap perfume.
Sex.
It had all but consumed him, he had let it consume him, back then. Anything he could do, reaching for the crimson rush of base sensation to burn out the pools of bottomless, electric blue that haunted his sleep and waking alike. He had been sixteen and just that side of jaded, what with swimming through water to forget that the sun looked like Haruka's faint, barely-there smile; and swimming through sensation to forget that the stars looked like Haruka's eyes when they sighted a particularly large body of water. And with the exhaustion of the two tearing him either way, it had been easy to ignore his Australian parents' worried attempts to get him to open up.
He's flying off the rails.
"Remind me again why we have to have joint practices with Iwatobi?" Sousuke's baritone yanks Rin out of his reverie, which is just as well, considering how it was leading him nowhere good.
"Because Ryuugazaki still beat you last time, so buck your ass up,"
Sousuke scowls at him.
"Yeah, sure," he mutters under his breath, Rin just barely catching it. "Like this has got nothing to do with your big, fat crush on Nanase."
It is a moment before Rin remembers to put on his outraged face.
"Excuse me?"
He glares when he just gets that annoying knowing look of his friend's in return.
"I'm sorry, but there are plenty of fish in the sea who are not weird, water-obsessed freaks," he tosses back, putting all his (always, always) pent-up vehemence behind it. "Why Haru, of all people?"
And Rin is actually really fucking lucky that all the emotional fuckery he's undergone hasn't fried his brain cells, because he kind of needs to change the subject, now.
"And besides," he picks up the conversation, entirely disregarding Sousuke's I'm pretty sure all the fish in the sea are water-obsessed freaks, "Are you sure the two-tenths of a second Ryuugazaki had on you didn't have anything to do with your bigger, fatter crush on Makoto?"
Sousuke's cheeks take on a dull flush, and Rin feels a vague sense of enjoyment as he lets his subsequent evil grins and snipes go on autopilot, mind disconnecting as it freaks the fuck out.
Why had he been so scarily calm at Sousuke's insinuation?
Why had he had to remind himself to react?
The answers stare him in the face with the same quiet intensity as the sapphire gaze they concern.
And Rin turns from them, just like he's always turned from the candor in those eyes, uncomfortable as that candor inspired the like from deep within him.
But they still bore into his back, spreading out over his skin, under it, fluid like a pricking caress he can't ignore.
He can't ignore Haruka.
He's never wanted to.
And so, he can't ignore that, when accused of harbouring feelings for him, he didn't even flinch, because of fucking course he harboured feelings for Haruka.
He harboured a fucking myriad of unfathomable feelings, ocean-deep and just as turbulent, for Haruka.
The only question was, just what were they?
Rivals, maybe. Certainly not friends.
But neither of the two explained the low curl of heat in his belly when their gazes locked, the mystifying magnetism that drew his touch, invariably, to the alabaster curves and angles tracing a path from the obsidian ink of an unruly fringe.
Drew it to wreck, destroy, watch the ice crash and burn. And maybe, just maybe, it would melt the frigid fear that Haruka swept in with himself.
What mattered, between them, except winning?
Rin closed his eyes, listening the the thump of the unrecognisable music on the radio align with his heartbeat. He was not looking forward to next Thursday's joint practice.
Chapter Management