Chasing Ghosts
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"So, Matsuoka-san, what's the story behind that pendant? Your fans have been speculating over its origins for quite some time, you know."
"What, this little thing? I didn't think anyone would have noticed."
"You've allegedly been spotted wearing it more times than we can count! Is there any significance behind it? Any sentimental attachment?"
"Uh, not really. It was—gifted to me by a friend, if that counts as sentimental significance. I guess I took to it, so I just kept on wearing it."
"Were you wearing it in Rio, too?"
"I can't recall, but probably."
"Speaking of Rio, your silver in the 100-metre butterfly is being talked about all over the world. How does it feel to be recognized as a top-tier Olympic athlete?"
"That's a pretty difficult question to answer," a laugh, "since the Olympics are something I've striven for ever since I was a kid, and to actually—"
The faint, artificial glow of the television screen dims and flickers—one more flash of brilliant red, of silver nestled under the white of his cottony jacket, of the beginnings of laughter (shoulders hitching, spine curving just that little bit, the characteristic lift of his eyebrows, the corners of his eyes always crinkle before his mouth smiles, he always laughs with all of him—) and Haruka promptly powers off the television.
The screen fades to black before he can catch the little nuances of the sound—a note of disquiet here, a tinge of confusion there, subtle cues that Haruka knows will be quivering just beneath the surface of his self-assuredness, but—it's not my business anymore, he thinks. It's empty, like the clang of rusted metal, and nothing more.
"Haru?" he hears from the doorway.
He stays there for a few seconds, sitting in front of a decade-old television and not knowing what to feel. Then, he carefully stows away the remote, puts it exactly where it was twenty minutes ago, and stands and calls out, "In here."
Makoto's arrival is preceded by the familiar rustle of plastic bags. He smiles and lifts up the bags. "I brought mackerel," he says simply.
"Give it here," says Haruka.
Makoto serenely hands him the bags, waiting for him to trudge his way to the kitchen before he follows. He eyes the sink and pile of dirty dishes with his quiet, compassionate brand of perspicacity.
"Do you want me to wash them?" he asks softly, softer than Haruka would have liked.
"Don't," he says anyway. "I'll do them later."
Haruka turns on the grill and ignores the thick, concerned quality of his friend's silence. Makoto glances, first, at the unwashed cup in the sink (the little grey, animated shark near the rim, the bits of day-old coffee inside that he knows his best friend doesn't drink—) and, second, at the boy standing still and vacant-eyed near the grill. Haruka pretends not to notice.
There are still two mouths to feed, after all. Never mind the third.
The thing is—the thing is, it's the little things that don't go away.
He'll wash the ridiculous coffee mug in the sink—he'll wash it and put it away and close the cabinet door without looking, but Rin's old legskins will still be tucked away in a corner of his tiny closet, and he'll see them every time he changes. Rin's toothbrush will still be lying in front of the bathroom mirror alongside his every morning. The ruby pendant will be safely out of sight in one of his bedside drawers, yes—but will it really matter? It's here, it's a part of his home, and it's a part of Rin. As long as that holds true, he won't need to see it to feel the phantom weight of it against his collarbone.
"Call him," Nagisa is saying, bright-eyed in his fervour and openly distressed for two of his best friends and so unalterably Nagisa that Haruka has to look.
"Nagisa," Makoto shushes him, but Nagisa ploughs on unhindered, "Why don't you two ever talk to each other?"
Because we're us, Haruka thinks privately, and means it. They're not unreserved affection and free-spoken conversations, like Nagisa and Rei. They're insignificant things blown out of proportion, mountains made out of molehills, emotions that burst at the seams before they can be talked about. They're little gestures and the absence of words more than the presence of them; Rin slipping into the bathtub behind him, Rin's fingers tracing the veins in his palm after sex, Rin kissing the nape of his neck when he finds Haruka cooking bacon and eggs for breakfast, Rin walking past him in the locker-room and catching his hand, squeezing it and letting go just before a race—
Stop, he thinks. Stop.
He shoves aside the futon of the kotatsu and stands up wordlessly, cutting off Nagisa in the middle of his rant. The silence that falls behind him is unnatural and the two pairs of eyes fixated on his back are relentless in their intensity, but if there's anything Haruka knows how to do, it's how to be remain unruffled by the world around him.
He can hear hushed whispers from the lounge while he's fixing tea. He catches a reprimanding, "you shouldn't have—" in Makoto's incongruously gentle tones, followed by Nagisa's unrepentant, "you know they have to, Mako-chan—" before he tunes them out. Watches steam curl above the stove instead and carefully dissociates himself from the emergent smell of ginger.
Ten blessedly quiet minutes later, he's setting down two cups of ginger tea before them.
"Aren't you going to have any, Haru-chan?" Nagisa says, fingers curling around his cup.
"I don't like ginger tea."
He blinks. "Then, why do you have it in your—" he pauses, and in typical Nagisa fashion, says, "Oh."
"I'll, uh," Makoto cuts in and starts to stand. There's a nervous edge to his smile. Haruka looks away. "I'll make you some oolong tea, Haru?"
"I'm out."
"Ah, don't worry, I brought some with the mackerel. Where did you put the bags?"
"Second cabinet," Haruka says, and thinks, of course. Of course Makoto brought him oolong tea, of course Makoto understands what Haruka can't process yet. Not for the first time, he feels a spark of gratitude for his best friend amidst the haze of distant uncertainty. He follows him to the kitchen.
"Mum's taking Ren and Ran to the amusement park tomorrow, so I'll be free all day," Makoto says over the tinkle of ceramic, pulling out Haruka's dolphin mug. Haruka glances up from the teabags, and Makoto smiles. "Want to go to the ocean?"
He has to stop and look at him for a moment, then. The spark flares into a more conscious realization of his childhood friend, all kind smiles and kind eyes and kind hands, kindness for anyone and everyone—but most unreservedly for Haruka.
"I'm coming, too!" Nagisa shouts from the lounge.
Makoto breaks into a peal of amused laughter. Haruka feels a smile creeping onto his own lips in turn.
Maybe it'll all be okay, in the end.
Except, of course, that's not the end—not if Nagisa Hazuki has anything to say about it.
It takes two days and a good night's sleep for the hollow confusion to retreat bit by bit. A few more impromptu trips to the beach and Mrs. Tachibana shoveling into his mouth what may be the best mackerel curry he's ever been treated to, and some hard-earned clarity of mind is finally returning to him—which is when everything goes pear-shaped again, courtesy of Nagisa.
He's lounging in the latter's bedroom, cross-legged and virtual-swimming his way through level six of Nagisa's 'Build an Underwater Town' game, when the door creaks open.
He expects it to be Nagisa with another plate of shortbread cookies. Only—
"Ah," says Rin, and Haruka's brain promptly shuts down.
It seems like Rin's has too, because he's standing in the doorway with frozen limbs and an unblinking stare. Haruka holds still, and waits. It takes a second, two, three, before his stare goes liquid and he opens his mouth, possibly to say something Haruka knows instinctively will take more steeled patience to stomach than he currently has to spare.
As per his responsibility, Nagisa sweeps in to the rescue.
"Ah, Rin-chan!" he chirps. "I called Haru-chan here for this assignment I needed help with, did I forget to mention?"
Haruka fixes him with a thoroughly unimpressed stare.
"Yeah," Rin grits out. "Yeah, you did, you little shit."
"No need for abuse," Nagisa says, unperturbed. "Come on, we can all get along, right? Go on, Rin-chan, sit. In fact, you know what, I'll get you guys another batch of cookies. I'll be right back!"
"Nagisa—!"
The door slams shut. Haruka immediately fishes his cell-phone out of his pocket and dials a familiar number.
"Rei," he says, as soon as the click of someone having picked up sounds through the line.
"Haruka-senpai, I'm so sorry!" Rei apologizes—near-sobs, really. "I tried to dissuade him, I really did! You know how he gets, he doesn't listen to anyone!"
"Rei."
"I told him, 'Nagisa-kun, this is a colossally bad idea, you know that, don't you?' And he said, 'Of course it's a bad idea, but it's a brilliant bad idea.' What does that even mean?"
"Rei."
"He refused to listen to reason! I'm so sorry, he's determined to go through with this crazy idea of his—!"
"Rei," Haruka says forcefully. "Tell him to stop."
Rei goes quiet on the other end, hysterical protestations giving way to controlled breathing. "I'm sorry, Haruka-senpai," he says softly, the contrition in his voice undeniably genuine. "I've tried. I truly have, but he—he's determined."
"What's he planning?"
"I—I don't know—"
"You know," Haruka asserts. "What is it?"
A pause. Haruka waits patiently.
"He—"
"Here we are!" Nagisa bursts in through the door, and the next thing Haruka hears is the dial tone. "A fresh batch of gingersnaps, how do you like that?"
They're Rin's favourite. He's not sure how he knows this, or if Rin ever told him, but the thought flashes unbidden across the forefront of his mind. He keeps his gaze focused on the plate and studiously away from Rin. He's quiet, Rin, but unease is in the twitch of his fingers against his knee. Stillness has never been one of his strong suits; he feels too much too quickly, a ball of pent-up energy—and especially now, when he's practically radiating agitation and something else Haruka's not quite willing to name, his presence in the room expands until it's stifling.
So Haruka slices through the tension right down its middle. He flips his phone shut, turns to Rin and says, "So? What are you here for?"
"I don't see how that's any of your business," Rin replies stiffly. His shoulders are hunched, like a wounded animal.
For just a moment, just one, Haruka lets resentment fleet through him. No, he finds himself thinking almost viciously, you don't get to be like that, you don't—
Alas, lingering emotions aren't his vice. They fade and crest in the flash of his eyes, and so he takes care to keep his stare unwavering and neutral. He won't give this boy anything.
(He's given him far too much already.)
"Rin-chan's place is getting renovated," Nagisa chips in. Haruka almost starts—he'd forgotten Nagisa was in the room with them. "He's looking for a place to stay," Nagisa continues, "so I told him he could stay here."
Rin says nothing, only turns away with an audible exhale. Haruka watches the rigid way he holds his back muscles—a curious, Rin-like mixture of defensive and exasperated.
"The thing is," the sheepish quality of Nagisa's chuckle is a dead give-away even before he finishes the sentence, "there might be a problem with that arrangement."
Rin's head whips towards him. "Problem?"
"Uh, yeah, it's like this—you know my two cousins, Sachiko and Mariko? No? Well, they're sort of—they're Mum's sister's second cousins twice removed—"
"Get on with it," Rin bites out.
"Yeah, well, they're coming to stay. I didn't know about it, I swear!" He holds up his arms in defense. "Mum just told me! So, anyway—Rin-chan, I'm really sorry, but it's going to be really hard for me to make enough room for you, too. But, guess what? The good news is, there's an easy solution to all this!"
Haruka has just enough time for a vague sensation of I don't like this before Nagisa, as usual, tramples all over his inhibitions in one fell swoop: "You can stay with Haru-chan!"
"What," Rin says. Haruka closes his eyes.
"No, come on, think about it. His place is just a few blocks away from mine, so location's not a problem. He lives alone, and it's not like you guys haven't stayed with each other before, right? It's perfect!"
"I'd rather just ask Makoto—"
"Mako-chan," Nagisa says emphatically, "is too busy running after Ren and Ran all over the place. Of course he'll say yes, because he's Mako-chan—but do you really want to bother him like that?"
There's not much they can say to that. As manipulative as Nagisa is, he isn't wrong. Nonetheless, Haruka cringes inwardly at the admission.
"Besides, you've already hauled all your stuff here, so it's not like you can haul it all the way back. The best option is to stay somewhere close, right? At least spend the night at Haru-chan's; you can figure out what to do in the morning."
"But," Rin says, almost woodenly, "all my stuff—"
"—will be sent over to Haru-chan's in the morning. I'll take responsibility, don't sweat it!"
Following the one-sided discussion, the two of them are promptly shooed out the door before they've completely recovered from the shock of being duped by one Nagisa Hazuki. Haruka only faintly manages to catch Mrs. Hazuki's, "going so soon, dears? Have a good night!" in his stupor, before the cool night air is beating against the side of his face.
Rin apparently undergoes the same transformation; he clicks his tongue and absently rubs the back of his neck, shoulders slumping in resignation.
"Are we going, then?" he says gruffly.
Haruka can't help but notice that the tone is a little softer, soft like are you cooking meat today, then? or are you wearing that pendant, then? or are you coming to the pool with me, then? He tries not to think too hard about it. Thinking too hard about anything Rin says or does never pans out well.
"Yeah," he grunts, and starts walking. Rin's footfalls behind him are steady, and constant, and heavier than his. They're comfortable and unnerving, familiar in essence but unfamiliar in their guardedness, too close and too far behind. Haruka breathes out, watching it turn to mist in front of him, and wonders if Rin is doing the same. Calm, he thinks. Water.
It's not quite enough, but he's getting there.
"I'm taking a bath," Haruka declares, as soon as they step in through the front door. He thinks he hears a grumbled, "of course," behind him, but Rin is otherwise unresponsive. Haruka doesn't look back.
When he's stripped down to his jammers and submerged up to his neck, he lets the water prod at his vulnerabilities, pry open his scabbed-over wounds in the only way he allows. A part of him expects Rin to have followed him, to slip into the tub and dump ice-cold water on his head and then nuzzle his soaked hair in halfhearted apology.
He swiftly dunks his head underwater—relaxes and loosens and unfurls amidst the familiar rush in his ears and feels the solitary quietude of water seep into his overworked mind—for two, twenty, forty seconds, before he resurfaces. Reality is always jarring—too bright, too loud—in the moments of his re-emergence. Makoto, ever-present with his outstretched hand, would always make it a little softer. Rin—Rin would share the water with him. Rin and the water, together, were his home.
Today, though—today, Rin is an integrated part of reality and not the water.
"—other news today, two suicide attempts were reported at Kyoto University. The students involved, Mizuhara Sa—"
The reporter's clean, neutral drawl is punctuated by a growl from Rin's stomach. Haruka's eyes slowly shift to him; he's stiff as cardboard, eyes fixated straight ahead.
"Idiot," he says, and Rin sinks into the sofa. "You should've told me you were hungry."
"Yeah, well," Rin says lowly, "maybe I was busy."
Haruka looks at him.
"I was busy, okay? I was watching TV!"
A glance at the television. "It's the news."
"So?"
"You never watch the news."
"What—" Rin makes a frustrated noise deep in his throat, "what do you want from me, Haru?"
This is when the stone-stiff defense begins to crack. His emotions swell up to his eyes, pooling and rising and overflowing until they cast a shadow over the bright, gleaming red. Haruka's been waiting for this, half-anticipating and half-dreading, wondering how much they'd be able to hide and hold in their depths. Now, staring right into them, he thinks he might not have been ready.
Then again, he muses, when has Rin ever waited till I'm ready?
"Sorry," he offers quietly. Rin opens his mouth, closes it, cracks open a little more. Haruka's beyond waiting—he walks away to the kitchen.
He makes it as far as the fridge before Rin clears his throat. "I guess you don't have any meat," he says awkwardly. "Mackerel, then?"
"No," Haruka huffs. He does have meat, miraculously. He just doesn't know if he should bother with it.
He spares Rin a glance, standing near the counter-top and edgily shifting his weight from one leg to another, and decisively pulls out the tray of beef with a quiet sigh. "No," he says again.
Rin's following him with his eyes, Haruka can feel it as surely as he feels his stroke in the next lane. But he's done talking.
Dinner is an awkward affair—quite possibly the most awkward thirty minutes of his life, save the time he walked in on Nagisa trying to go down on Rei. The clatter of cutlery fills the room and bounces off the walls, heard and made too consciously for it to feel remotely natural. The beef is overcooked. Their eyes don't meet.
"I'm done," Haruka says. Almost flinches at the screech of chair legs dragging over linoleum flooring.
"Wait—" Rin calls out. He's half out of his chair when Haruka looks over his shoulder.
"I was—I'm—" he stumbles over his words. Haruka's grip on the stack of plates clenches, just a little. Rin sighs and combs his fingers through his fringe. In the end, he settles with, "Where am I going to sleep tonight?"
His gaze drops away from Haruka's. It's roving over the surface of the table now, as if out of shame. What do you have to be ashamed over, Haruka thinks hollowly, more of a pointless statement than a question. Ghosts of the first two days envelop him. Shoving its way back into his mind is the nothingness from before—and beneath it, anger, simmering.
"The guest room is down the corridor. Spare blankets are in the store room," Haruka says, and it's cold—low and frigid.
He turns away before he can see Rin's reaction. It takes him seven seconds to dump the plates in the kitchen sink, wash his hands and walk past Rin to his room. He's standing in the middle of it, all bare feet and quiet breaths, long after he slides the door close. The thud of Rin's footsteps sounds outside, muffled and fading second by second. Haruka nearly stops breathing to listen a little more closely.
Then, just like that, they're gone. Just like that, he repeats in his head. For a split-second, he feels something nameless and overwhelmingly oppressive pressing down on him. It comes and goes, like a flash of the sea. Haruka breathes out.
He needs a bath.
The morning after, he wakes up to the smell of burning toast. His nose twitches.
He's only half-lucid, but Haruka vaguely registers the sound of something sizzling in the distance. It strikes an eerily familiar chord in him, reminiscent of his kitchen being razed to the ground (all in good intentions, which he considers even worse). He longingly eyes the bathroom door.
Just half an hour, then.
When he steps out, hair dripping wet and his Iwatobi-chan shirt thrown on, the damage is thankfully minimal. Three pieces of charred toast lie in a plate near the stove. Two other pieces, marginally better and apparently just barely edible, have been tossed into a different plate.
"What are you doing?" Haruka says, and Rin jumps.
"Shit, don't do that—!" He deflates, running a hand through his hair. "I figured you'd stick to mackerel for breakfast, so I thought I'd..." he trails off, waving an arm at the occupied slab in a somewhat self-deprecating gesture. "Yeah."
Haruka gives it two seconds of contemplation, and then, "Move."
"What?" Rin blinks, automatically shuffling aside when Haruka steps forward.
He shoots him a sideways glance, lifts up a spatula almost comically and says, "I'll help."
He looks surprised, Haruka notes absently—as if Haruka's never cooked for him before, as if he's never bumped Rin's hip with his own in a wordless move aside, as if he's never swiped the spatula from Rin's hand and been kissed behind the ear in thanks.
"I can do it myself, you know," Rin is saying, but it comes out quiet and unsure. Haruka doesn't reply.
He's unconsciously tapping his foot as an outlet for all his nervous energy, standing two feet away from Haruka and looking like he doesn't know whether to stay still or move closer or put some distance between them. Haruka feels something tighten in his chest, some God-awful mess of endearment and resignation and why won't he come near me why won't I go near him what happened—
"Make yourself useful and put the water to boil," he says, out of consideration for both himself and Rin.
"Going," Rin grunts, but he looks grateful. "Teabags?"
"Second cabinet."
There's the clink of glass and ceramic behind him, the slam and creak of wooden drawers. It's a spectral mockery of their time together, but Haruka endures. Or, at least—he endures until the sounds abruptly fade to nothing.
He's wondering at the sudden quiet when Rin says, "My cup—" he clears his throat, "the shark mug, it's not here."
Haruka's fingers freeze over the pan. "It's in the bottom drawer," he says after a second's pause.
"You put it away?" Rin says in a rush. The words are hurried and immediate, almost blending into one another in their haste.
He doesn't know what to say. Nobody was using it sounds dismissive, and I couldn't stand to look at it sounds cruel, even though that's the farthest thing from what Haruka would mean it to be. He doesn't know what to say, so he says nothing at all.
"Right," Rin says, murmurs it bitterly under his breath. "'Course you put it away."
He could say, "Rin, stop," but he knows, he knows how that would play out—in 'you were the one who left' and 'you backed me into a corner' and 'it's always about you'. It always ends in too many 'you's.
"Are you still making the tea?" Haruka asks instead, nothing given away.
Rin barks out a laugh, and it's a pitiful, embittered thing. "Yeah," he says roughly. "Yeah, I'm still making the fucking tea, Haru."
I have to call Nagisa, Haruka thinks. Tries thinking, water, too, but it doesn't work this time. So he clings to that one frayed string of thought—I have to call Nagisa—with single-minded focus, flushing the rest of himself stark-white and empty.
According to Rin, it's what he does best.
Nagisa, the plotting mastermind that he is, refuses to answer his phone. As a back-up option, Haruka dials a call to Makoto instead.
"Haru? What is it?"
"Nagisa," he starts, and it's enough.
There's a pause at the other end. "What did he do?"
"He's forcing Rin to room with me. His apartment's getting renovated."
Makoto sighs, age-old and chagrined. "I should've known he would do something like this. And he's not picking up his phone now, I'm guessing?"
"No."
"Have you tried calling Rei?"
"Rei isn't co-operating," Haruka says darkly.
Makoto chuckles nervously. "Well, I can't say I'm surprised," he pauses. The silence on the other end is hesitant, and a little expectant. "How are you and Rin holding up?"
"We're managing," is all Haruka can say without having to divulge the full extent of their discomfort.
In the end, he doesn't have to. "Ah," Makoto says. The tone is more effective than an outright I told you so. Haruka frowns.
"Do you think he's, maybe, not picking up your calls especially?"
"Probably," Haruka admits.
"I'll try calling him. See if I can get him to see sense," he sighs. "You know you can always stay at mine, right? If it ever becomes too much."
He's a little surprised at the offer—at the ease with which his best friend can see through him.
Apparently, it shows in his silence. Makoto laughs a little, softly and under his breath. "I'm on your side, Haru. You know that, right?" he says, and the smile in his voice is clear as day. "I'm always on your side."
"I know," Haruka replies. It's not as soft as Makoto's promise—doesn't have quite the same sensitivity or that quality of unobtrusive understanding, but it's all Haruka has to offer.
"Take care of yourself," he bids him goodbye, and then Haruka's listening to the dial tone. When he looks up, Rin's leaning against the doorway.
"Was that Nagisa?" he asks.
Haruka shakes his head. "Makoto."
Rin clicks his tongue, curling his lips over a sharp tch. Frustration revives a familiar frown between his eyebrows; Haruka catches a bare glimpse of it before he whips his neck to the side. His fringe is growing too long, he notes. An abstracted, languid quality clings to his perception, but at the same time, he's acutely aware of Rin—a single point of too-bright colour thrown sharply into focus. It's a strange thing to feel.
"Fucking Nagisa," Rin curses under his breath.
"Makoto said he'll try to contact him," Haruka offers tentatively.
"Well, whatever," Rin murmurs. "I'll be out of your hair soon enough, anyway."
It's not (has never been) what he hears, though—it's what he sees: a slump in the line of his shoulders, muscles not relaxing but loosening, unnatural stillness, breathing too slow, too even. He looks as if he could crumple against the doorway any second.
(He looks seventeen again, standing in front of a cherry-blossom tree and waiting for the world to collapse.)
"You never say what you mean when you're like this," Haruka says. It's meant to be a private observation, a prelude to another it's not my business anymore. But Rin's spine goes rod-straight and his eyes snap to attention and—and there go Haruka's hopes for it ending there.
"What did you say?" Rin demands, spinning around in a flurry of red and black.
Haruka's in the middle of mentally kicking himself, so all he manages is a useless, "Nothing."
"Like fuck it was nothing."
"Rin—"
"I don't say what I mean?" he—doesn't shout, per say, but the tone is aggressive enough to do the job. "At least I say something, like, what do you even—"
"Rin, listen—"
"—mean by that, you couldn't have said that shit a week ago, when I was crazy enough to—"
He freezes, but Haruka sees the beginning of the words forming around his mouth. To leave, he finishes in his head. Feels his chest expand and constrict in all their hurt and dogged affection, faces the realization that Rin's must be doing the same, and spontaneously comes to a decision.
He shoulders past Rin on his way out, right past the, "Whoa, hey—where do you think you're going?"
"You're coming with me," he says instead.
"I'm—what? Where?"
Haruka meets his eyes then, for the first time in a too-long while. "To the pool."
They don't talk on the way to Iwatobi. The pool is sacred ground, not to be desecrated with the jagged lines and tears of their relationship. They are, for once, above that. Only here, they'll be above that.
The sun is on the verge of setting; lingering traces of evening light cling to the edges of the pool. The club is deserted, the water absolutely still.
It's perfect.
Haruka wastes no time in stripping down to his jammers and diving in. Rin's not quite as uninhibited; even after he's changed into his legskins, he looks torn between demanding an explanation and just throwing caution to the wind and following Haruka's lead. His indecisiveness translates into restless movements that worm their way into his usual easy confidence.
"Just get in," Haruka says.
"Easy for you to say," Rin retorts. His scowl softens into a sigh. "Haru, why'd you bring me here?"
He considers these few seconds carefully—Rin standing at the edge of the pool, Rin looking at him squarely and a little hopefully and like he's steeled for disappointment, Rin asking him a question Haruka never bothered to ask himself, Rin demanding an answer that's more intrinsic than it is deliberate, something that's entrenched so deeply and so inexorably into what he feels for Rin that it's impossible to put into words without unraveling eight years of wonderful, disastrous longing.
"It felt right."
Rin's eyes flicker. He opens his mouth to argue, but Haruka doesn't let him.
"I like the water better," he admits quietly, "when you're in it with me."
Rin stares. He breathes in, deep and steady, and lifts a large hand to cover his face.
"Haru," he says slowly, "you can't say stuff like that."
Haruka stares back.
"You cannot say stuff like that."
"Why? It's true," he says. His tone is unchanged but there's the slightest lift of his chin, the stubbornness in his gaze and his tacit refusal to look anywhere but at Rin.
Choas runs amok in the depths of Rin's eyes—frustration is plain to see, and beneath that, wariness, and beneath that, resignation, and far beneath that, a hopeless sort of desperation Haruka wishes he could dig out to the surface and do away with. But the lines of Rin's face are deepening, and Haruka has lost the privilege to lay his hands on them, touch them with his wet fingers and smooth them out with a caress.
"Fine," Rin says. His voice is low and a little dangerous. No waver.
"You're getting in?"
"No," he snaps. "I'm going to race you. I'm going to fucking race you, okay? So get out of the pool."
It's familiar territory. His shoulders lose their obstinate rigidity even before he climbs out of the pool. They roll and loosen, and then tighten again with anticipation as he mounts the starting block.
"Ready," Haruka hears Rin give the start signal, "set, go!"
They dive. Rin's kick is stronger, but it scarcely matters once they're underwater. The water amplifies Rin's presence next to him, twisting into waves and coming to life in the same way all of Rin's energy transforms into a turbulent sort of focus in the pool. Or—no, not the pool. It's not the pool, it's the race—a race with Haruka, always. Always.
And again, he's swept up in the waves of Rin's intensity, pushing and pulling turn for turn and refusing to be left behind.
Wait for me, Haruka looks at Rin and feels all his submersed emotion take form, I'm coming with you. I'll always—
He's home.
In the end, Haruka wins.
Rin dwells on the loss for no more than a handful of seconds. Time passes like lightning after the race they've had, but it's long enough for him to vocalise his disappointment with a soft che in between panting breaths. It's tamer now—less wild, less teeming with aggravation and unrealised wishes.
"Again," Rin says, unapologetic and full of challenge, but Haruka notices foremost the unflinching quality of his glare. It's straight and without pretense, without barriers, and it's trained on Haruka and Haruka alone.
He nods, and they mount their starting blocks again.
The second time, Rin wins. The third time, it's too close to tell and they're too charged with adrenaline to care. Rin's grinning, all sharp teeth and shining eyes and golden, every inch the Olympic silver-medalist. He laughs with all of him. He laughs with all of him and Haruka—Haruka, like every other time, is taken in like a moth to a flame.
"What?" Rin questions, having caught him staring.
Haruka doesn't avert his eyes. He watches water droplets gleam on the surface of his skin, clinging close and snug like a lover's touch.
He closes his eyes and says, "Nothing."
There's a shift in the atmosphere, then. Rin apparently senses it, the grin sliding off his face. His eyes retain their rawness, but the unbridled blaze from before sharpens and furls into a concentrated point of intensity. Suddenly, Haruka is on the receiving end of a fierce, unyielding sort of focus—it hurts to look back. He feels naked and exposed, skin peeled away and vulnerabilities laid bare.
He turns away.
"Let's get out," he murmurs, and starts to climb out. "It's getting la—"
A grip on his wrist stops him. He looks back, and Rin says, "Wait."
For a second, Haruka thinks it's going to be a repeat of last time. But the tug on his wrist is far from uncertain, Rin isn't floundering for words or running a hand through his hair or staring down at the godforsaken dinner table.
Another tug. Reluctantly, he slides back into the pool. Rin draws closer—crowds him against the side of the pool with a step there, a shove here, movements that feel gentle and heavy and curiously controlled in their combined slowness and forcefulness.
"I'm going to kiss you," Rin says to him, and Haruka has no time to react before his lips are on his.
He breathes into Rin's mouth—a surprised puff of an exhale. Eventually, though, it stops feeling like a surprise with the coaxing glide of Rin's lips over his, and starts feeling more like an inevitability. Of course it's an inevitability, a voice in his head scoffs. It sounds suspiciously like Nagisa. Haruka would have paid more attention if he wasn't so busy relearning the slight dip of Rin's lower lip, the way his mouth opens and fits right over Haruka's.
It's in between nibbling kisses to his collarbone that Rin murmurs, "Out."
"What—?"
"We need to," a suckling kiss to his throat, below his jaw, "get out of the pool," another kiss, harder, to his mouth, "I need," he pulls away, eyes fervent, "a bed."
"Okay," is all Haruka can breathe out, leaning his forehead against Rin's. "Okay."
The walk back is silent. It's a charged, strained sort of silence, not too different from the edgy impatience of two hours ago—except, this time, it's impatience of the need to get closer variety instead of where are we going or walk a little faster or I don't know what to do now.
Rin never once lets go of his wrist. He walks briskly ahead of Haruka, but his grip is iron-tight and unrelenting. The closer they get to home, the more it tightens; a block away, it starts to hurt a little. Haruka doesn't flinch. Pain is the last thing on his mind.
They stumble in through the front door, and Rin is on him. He's focused and feral and hasn't shed any of his brilliance, and Haruka could never resist him.
"Rin—" he starts to say. Rin interrupts him with a sharp, punishing bite to his bare shoulder, and the words choke in Haruka's throat.
"No," he murmurs, almost growls it against Haruka's ear. "No talking, okay? No talking."
He purses his lips. They're not even drunk, for god's sake—they're sober and stupid and collectively aware of their stupidity. In another universe, Haruka would be disregarding Rin's command and twisting away from feverish kisses and wandering hands on his body.
The problem with this universe, though—the problem with this universe is that Haruka's lifting his arms when Rin tries to wrestle his shirt off, that he's opening his mouth as wide as it can go to every thrust of Rin's tongue, that his wrist is still throbbing and he wouldn't have it any other way.
It takes them a solid five minutes to find the bedroom door. The lights are still switched off (owing to a considerable lack of mental clarity from either side), so they grope blindly in the dark for something, anything—a surface, a doorknob, a couch, and most of all for each other. Rin's palms are hot and desperate, flitting all over his body as if they have too many places to mark and leaving handprints in their wake that Haruka feels as surely as the push and drag of ocean waves.
The first instance of hesitation comes at the doorway. For all his assertiveness and surging intensity, Rin still questions if he will be welcome here again. The hand at Haruka's lower-back loses some of its heat, and Haruka wants it to press harder, wants it lower, so—
"Should I—" Rin starts.
Haruka silences him with a hand over his mouth. His eyes gleam blue in the dark.
"No talking," he says.
The morning after, Haruka wakes up emotionally exhausted and aching.
His lips are swollen, his neck stings, and his limbs are heavier than lead. Under the sheets, his thighs feel sticky and shaky and stubbornly refuse to move without persistent tremors subduing them into debility again. A sharp, telling pain shoots up his spine every time he shifts. He feels too full.
Haruka rubs the grit out of his eyes and cranes his neck; the space next to him is empty.
I can't move, he thinks groggily. I can't move and Rin is gone.
He stares up at the ceiling, blinks slowly and follows the patterns being traced out by the morning sun. His mind draws a blank on all but these two things: I can't move (Rin was with me last night) and Rin is gone (he's not with me anymore). There's no toast burning, nothing sizzling in the background—nothing except for an unstirred stagnancy in the air, and Haruka feels something in him sink.
He walks past the bathroom mirror without so much as a glance. His reflection will be sporting an array of vicious reds and glaring blues and purples, and god knows he wanted them last night but—but Rin is gone and he's free to revel in the guilt, now.
Yet, in the shower, he grazes the line of his waist with his fingertips, as if the dull ache he feels there is a physical, tangible entity. He remembers, in flashes of pain and pleasure, the firm circle of Rin's arms when he sunk into Haruka, buried his face between his neck and shoulder and held onto him for dear life. He remembers mouthing I'm here into Rin's hair, stroking it when Rin trembled and dug his fingers into the dip of Haruka's hipbone, pushing it back to meet his eyes when Rin broke apart in hitches and deep, searching glides.
Damn it.
He tilts his head up towards the shower spray. Water numbs the ache, some. It takes the edge off the fullness.
If his body feels a little less like his own for it, Haruka doesn't have to notice.
The ruby pendant is out of the drawer.
It's out of the drawer and on the cherry-wood bedside table. The shadowy vermilion under the surface is less distinct than he remembers and the silver-lined edges have had their shine dulled by dust and darkness. After weeks in a sunless corner, the glass surface doesn't reflect the light in quite the same way. Haruka sits cross-legged at the edge of his bed, bared torso and dripping hair and dampened bedsheets, and he can't stop staring.
He doesn't touch it. His fingers itch and burn, but he keeps his hands in his lap, loosely clenched and useless.
He wants to touch it. He wants to run a finger along the fine venetian chain, pick it up and lock it around his neck, feel his skin prickle against the jarring coldness. He wants so much—
A rap against wood. He turns around, and there Rin is with his knuckles against the doorway.
"Mind if I come in?" he says. Politeness sounds awkward on his tongue, in this room.
"Sure."
"Thanks. I didn't, uh," he shuffles in, scratches at his nose, "didn't know if I'd be—yeah."
You were in here a few hours ago, Haruka doesn't say. He asks, instead, "How long have you been up?"
"What—oh," Rin replies distractedly. His eyes flit across the room—wall, carpet, desk, repeat. "I don't know, a couple of hours, probably."
"Should've woken me up."
"I just thought—I didn't know if you'd be, I mean," he stumbles over words, breathes in and meets Haruka's eyes for just one desolate second, "if you would—"
Haruka looks at him sharply. "I'm not going to blame you, Rin. I can own up to my own stupidity."
The air around them falls quiet, then. It feels stale, weighed down and fueled by heavy breaths and all the muted, lingering sentiments they cocoon.
"Stupidity," Rin repeats blankly, "right. So that's what you're—right."
Haruka seals his lips shut. I won't, he promises. Again: Not this time, I won't, and again, and again.
Rin is watching the thin, stubborn line of his mouth, reading the outlines of Haruka's promise to himself in it. He punctures the thick silence with a ragged, fractured exhale.
"That's it, then?" he grits out. His voice is gravelly, littered with uneven shifts and rumbling tones from deep in his throat. His eyes are spewing fire, nothing held back. He's transparent—wrenched open and bare, pitiably unprotected from the consuming ferocity of his own emotions. Sex has always done this to him, Haruka recalls. "You're not going to say anything? Don't you feel anything?"
"What do you want me to say, Rin?" Haruka says quietly.
"Say fucking something! Don't just—!" He clicks his tongue and whips his head to the side, catching sight of the pendant in the process. His eyes grow darker. "You say you're here with me one minute and the next you're, what—avoiding me like the plague? Saying jack shit to me? Why do you even have that anymore?" He waves an arm at it, still untouched and lying innocuously on the table.
Haruka's eyes sweep over to Rin's. Something sour and acidic and potently sad boils in his stomach.
In a rare moment of forthrightness, he says, "You're still wearing yours, aren't you?"
Rin freezes. The set of his shoulders locks in place, a brittleness pervading through them. Haruka doesn't miss the way his hand twitches; his fingers curl and then straighten, as if catching themselves in the middle of an urge to grasp.
"Did you think I wouldn't notice?" he continues. It's spoken softly and without inflection, no dulcet tones or mocking lilt, but it's enough to feed the fire.
"Fuck you," snaps Rin. "Don't even go there, Haru."
"It goes both ways, Rin."
"Not with us, it fucking doesn't! You keep doing this, you keep—dragging me along to wherever you—!"
"You have no right to say that to me," Haruka says stonily, his eyes narrowing. "I keep swimming for you, and you keep asking for more—"
"That's not—!"
"I swam for you in elementary, I swam for you in high school, I listened to you say you'd quit swimming, I watched you leave again and again, Rin—"
"You know why I—!"
"I followed you here," he ploughs on,"and you keep asking for more—"
"Shut up!"
It takes a split-second and a single misstep, a splash of vindictive truthfulness smudged into their one step forward, two steps back routine, and Rin's anger explodes. He snatches up the ruby pendant—the closest thing to him, a remnant, smoke rising—from the table, and suddenly Haruka's hearing the crack of glass breaking cut through the air.
Shock stiffens his body. It turns his legs to rock, makes the skin over his knuckles stretch and whiten. The hurt shows on his face, he can feel it—and won't Rin be delighted?
But Rin is frozen, too. Haruka wonders, first, did he throw it on purpose? and second, does it matter?
He pushes himself off the bed, carefully does not look at Rin, and walks over to the far-side of the room with leaden feet and impossibly quiet footfalls. There's a bone-deep tiredness in him, pulsating but curled into itself. It rises to the surface of his self-possession now, when he kneels in front of the chipped pendant. His shoulders drop like a stone sinks in the sea.
"It's cracked," Haruka says. His voice is just this side of raspy.
He runs a gentle thumb over the protrusion. It feels rough and jagged, biting into his skin. It feels broken, and Haruka wants to cry.
Rin's voice is low and unsteady when he speaks. "Don't—" he starts, and stops with an abrupt inhale. Haruka can almost hear him swallow.
"Please," he tries again, "don't—don't throw it away."
Haruka doesn't look back. He can see it all in his head—the outstretched hand, the precise, self-deprecating curl of his fingers, the pleading twist of his mouth, the crease of his eyebrows, the storm in his eyes—but he's staring down at the gemstone with his thumb over the crack, and he's not looking back.
"Rin, you're the one who threw it."
You're the one who left, he says—and Rin hears loud and clear.
"I didn't—!" his voice crests to a breaking point, then settles in the resonant undercurrent. "I'm sorry. You know I wouldn't—that I wouldn't—!"
I know, he thinks, I know I love you I know I know you so well and I love you I love you—
"Not now," he breathes out in a slow sigh, abstractedly aware of Rin's attention. "I can't, right now." I can't do this right now, and I need you to go, and I need you to understand why.
(A moment. Close your eyes, breathe in, wait, and there it is—footsteps, closer and then further, near-silent click of the door, hold still, wait, wait—)
He gives himself thirty fragmented seconds.
(—breath out.)
After, he's dialing Makoto's number with his right hand and gripping the ruby in his pocket with the left.
"Haru? What is it?"
"I had a fight with Rin," a pause, "I also slept with him."
A few seconds, and then: "Oh, Haru," Makoto says, and nothing more. Absently, Haruka stares up at the ceiling. Daylight is skirting around the edges where the walls meet, now. He opens his mouth.
"Is that offer still open?"
The soft beige of Makoto's bedroom walls is a breath of fresh air after the constant woody-brown of his house.
"Haru-chan!" Ren and Ran waste no time in leaping out at him from their places beside the bed, wrapping their tiny arms and legs around his waist. He absently rests a hand behind Ren's shoulder to keep him from losing his balance.
"They've been missing you," Makoto says, smiling the way he always does—as if he has enough compassion to heal all the deserving and undeserving people in the world, and still have some left over. His green eyes search out Haruka's, and Haruka has never been able to gauge their depth in full, but even he can pick out an are you alright? when it's so patently genuine.
He closes his eyes, hitches Ren up higher against his hip, and murmurs, "Sorry."
Just like that, the concern disappears from Makoto's eyes to be swiftly replaced with contented indulgence. He pats the space on the bed next to him.
"Dinner will be ready soon," he says. "Until then—I have a new installment of Reel Fishing...?"
The heavier conversations come later, of course.
"You and Rin," Makoto is saying, "you two look at each other in a way I've never seen anybody look at anybody, Haru. You have to know that."
They're lounging on Makoto's terrace, appetites sated and night clothes slipped on. It's one a.m. and the surrounding buildings are comfortably cloaked in darkness. They have all the time in the world, and it's the last thing Haruka wants.
"I don't agree with what Nagisa did," Makoto sighs. "It wasn't right to force you into something you weren't ready for, but—eventually, you'll have to talk."
Haruka leans against the railing, blinks against the thickening fog without a word.
"Haru," Makoto calls out to him, and it's slower and gentler than before. He tenses. "He loves you, you know."
Of course he knows. Of course he knows, he wouldn't forgive himself if he ever doubted—
"I know you wouldn't doubt him," he says, and Haruka's eyebrow twitches. Makoto smiles. "But," he continues, "he deserves to know that, too."
They fall quiet. The seconds tick by, coalescing into a minute, into two. The cicadas are chirping, and Haruka's mind is racing at a hundred kilometers per hour.
"You need time?" Makoto asks him, his voice nearly buried under the shrill cicadas' song.
Haruka nods. After a second's pause, he adds, "Rin does, too."
"He doesn't seem to think so, though."
"He never does."
Makoto chuckles, and it's laced with a weighty sort of understanding. "Well, he's always been impatient."
They stand there for an indeterminable while longer, watching and waiting for distant lights to flicker.
"Let's go back in," Makoto says eventually. Haruka follows him through the balcony door, sliding it shut and turning the lock.
After they've straightened their sheets and fluffed their pillows and closed the lights, he fishes out the pendant from his pocket and places it with careful fingers on Makoto's desk, right at the back with the clown fish keychain.
His best friend asks him no questions other than a very quiet, very mindful, "Do you want me to put it somewhere safer?"
"It's fine," Haruka says, and that's the end of it.
Life goes on, with or without Rin. There's Makoto, there's Ren and Ran, there's Mrs. Tachibana and her mackerel curry, there are family dinners and evenings lazed away with video games and clichéd soap operas and animated monster movies. There is the Tachibana household in all its effortless, overwhelming acceptance. It's not quite home, but perhaps it's something better.
Hours pass like the patient turning of loved, well-worn pages of a book, and yet, the peace feels more like a standstill. He's standing at the edge of a cliff overlooking a typhoon—safe and dry and impregnably separated.
"When do you plan to go back?" Makoto asks him one day.
They're sitting on a hideous parrot-green park bench with a crooked N+K scribbled in Haruka's corner. It's high noon and bright-hot sunbeams are dancing from leaf to leaf on the pine trees, and it's reminding him of Rin, a little bit, for no discernible reason.
"Soon," he answers. "Probably tomorrow."
"I'm glad," is all Makoto offers. The words are scarce, spoken with the same ever-forgiving tongue and the same curve of his smile—but his eyes on Haruka are warmer than sunshine and invaluable in the things they say: you'll be fine and you'll always be free and, above all, please be happy—precious, immutable things nestled in the parallel lanes and bifurcations of the countless years between them.
He can breathe and think, 'Tomorrow,' without it thrusting him into another standstill. But—
—he's not under the waves yet.
The waves don't wait till tomorrow, for better or for worse. They come knocking at his door at eleven minutes and forty-five seconds past nine, half an hour after dinner. Haruka is alone with a half-empty stomach and heavy-lidded eyes—still, unguarded, noting the little, narrow ridges on Makoto's off-white ceiling and recalling the grainy appearance of ivory paint on his.
The first string of knocks, confident and ringing faintly of urgency, barely grazes the plane of his thoughts. It's Makoto's voice that has him sitting up—sombre, unwavering, exuding the kind of authority he's normally so quick to shy away from.
"—can't, I'm sorry. I know where you're coming from, but you've got to let him think things over at his own pace."
"You know how he is, you know he never admits to—"
His heart jumps.
"—cornering him isn't the answer, Rin."
"And babying him is? You know he always—you know that as long I don't get up there and in his face, he'll never—"
Haruka pushes the door open. It's all quiet hinges, quiet footsteps on the rug, amplified voices in the hallway—until he's at the first stair and his head is spinning and he's thinking, what do I do?
"That may be true, but—"
"Makoto," he calls out instinctively, and they freeze.
He spares Makoto a single, fleeting glance from behind the banister, before the red in his peripheral vision starts pulling at the frayed, numbed edges of his mind with violent tenterhooks. He feels something unnamed bleeding (back) into him when his eyes land on Rin. There's something there—something distinctly liquid, battered but still brilliant, like molten iron with all its lustre and its old, tired, rusted bits.
His voice is rich with it when he speaks: "Rin."
"Haru," Rin says in the same voice. He squares his jaw. "We need to talk."
Haruka nods. His gaze passes over Makoto one more time, just long enough to see his shoulders relax, and then he's walking back into the room without another word.
Rin follows—of course he does. Haruka's fiddling with one of the ornate photo frames on Makoto's desk when he hears the door click shut behind him. It's a family picture, snapped around five years ago, when Haruka was fifteen and Makoto was fourteen and nine months and Rin was—Rin was in Australia. He puts it back with an inaudible sigh, and turns around.
Rin is sitting on the bed—knees apart, fingers interlinked, spine arched forward, limbs too loose to be natural. His eyes don't change; the same intensity flickers, dormant, somewhere under their too-bright surface and above their too-dark well. It comes alive and dies out again with every blink, every minuscule movement that Haruka makes.
"So then," Rin begins. Haruka frowns at the sardonic undertone. "Are you starting or should I?"
"Don't be a dick," he says.
The cruel twist to his mouth melts away. Rin sighs, and it's chock-full of resignation and hopelessness, and it's real.
"I want to make this right," he murmurs, "but I don't know how. I don't know where to start."
Haruka waits. He waits like he's twelve again. A second ticks by, and he's thirteen. Fourteen, and fifteen, and sixteen. Finally, he's seventeen and his world is being carelessly invaded again.
"For the longest time," Rin is saying, "I swam for you. For the longest time, okay? You don't know how fucking long."
I do, though, Haruka thinks.
"I had—have—my own dreams, yeah, but I still—you're always there, you know? And when we were twelve—or seventeen?" he laughs humourlessly, "does it even fucking matter what age we were? It doesn't matter—like I said, you were always there. First there was that relay and you were—you were it, I swam as fast as I could and slapped that wall and saw you dive and I thought, that's it. And then everything went to shit but I still, always—"
He looks up at Haruka, then. "D'you get it?" Rin asks, and it sounds terrible. It sounds miserable, and helpless, and desperate, and Haruka never wants to hear it again.
"You didn't swim for me," he tries to explain, slowly. "You swam because of me."
"Yeah, well, doesn't make a fucking difference, does it?"
"It does," Haruka stresses, persistently holding onto Rin's wounded glare. "It does, Rin."
"Maybe to you, but what about me? I can't help—I'll never not want to swim with you!"
"I want to swim with you, too," Haruka replies, "but this isn't—it doesn't have to be the Olympics, Rin."
"I know that!" Rin erupts. "You think I don't know that? God, this is so stupid—I asked and you refused and it's done, I know, but I can't let it go. I just—" the explosion fizzles out in a breath exhaled, in a single movement where he drops his head into his hands, "I don't want us to fight over this, okay? I don't. But I'm a fucking selfish asshole when it comes to you and I always want everything."
Scant seconds (years?) trickle through the cracks in their armour. Standing dazed and self-conscious, Haruka is dreadfully afraid of the things he could say: I love your selfishness, I fell in love with how you couldn't let things go, it's what made me swim for you, I meant it when I said I'm here—
He walks over to the bed, lowers himself beside Rin until their elbows are knocking together.
"I'm not saying I won't," he says very, very quietly. Everything that follows, Haruka can see without looking. He can feel it all as an intimate weight in his bones: there is the sudden tension in the line of Rin's neck, his head whipping to the side in a flurry of violet-red. There is the burn Haruka feels on the side of his face.
This is all it would take, but he presses on.
"It's not going to be now, or even soon. Maybe never. All I'm saying is, Tokyo is four years away," he turns to meet his eyes, "and we have time. It doesn't have to be all or nothing."
Rin's eyelashes are wet with unshed tears, clumped and irradiated by the fluorescent lamp to a dusky orange-red. Haruka remembers counting them when Rin was asleep, once. He gave up on twenty-three.
"Sorry, I'm sorry," he chokes out. "I don't know how to not want this—"
Haruka shuffles closer, presses the length of his forearm against Rin's. The backs of their fingers brush against each other.
"I want to swim with you," he says, "not for you, or because of you."
He barely manages past the 'you' before his hand is being crushed in a death-grip.
"I love you," Rin says, and it's nothing beautiful. It's ugly and tearful and a lot like why can't I be free?
Their beautiful I love yous are all done and dusted (and there were many. There were many.) What remains is this:
—vivid red against the blue-green sheen of a moonlit ocean,
five millimetres of air,
and I want you, I want you, give me anything, I'll take anything you give me,
them. Haruka, and Rin, and Haruka and Rin.
Yes, Haruka thinks. Breathing and finding out that he can, after weeks of stale air in his lungs. Calm washing over him. The cadence of Rin's heartbeat, in congruity with the ocean waves he can always hear. The smell of home. Slow-spreading warmth. Red.
I didn't refuse you. I would never refuse to swim with you.
"There's nothing you could do or say to me that would make me refuse to swim with you," Haruka murmurs under his breath, more to himself than to Rin. Rin's breath hitches against the shell of his ear.
It takes a while (though the seconds are only seconds now, and the minutes are shorter than minutes), but the grip on his hand loosens. It softens so preciously, uncoils like something newborn rising from the ashes, and then—then, Rin's fingers are slipping into the spaces between his own. Haruka closes his eyes and savours the squeeze. Lets the tenderness float to the open surface of him, like an embrace at the edge of a tournament pool, like you showed me the best sight I could've asked for. Opens them.
Rin smiles, and that's it, that's it, he's in—
He's under the waves and over the sky and everything in between—
He's free.