English had never been so fucked-up.
Or maybe it's just that he has never been so royally shitfucked in his entire life, Rin reflects bitterly, stabbing his pencil into the single, lonely sheet of paper adorning his desk. The digital red numbers facing him in silent, electronic censure, ensconced in their black plastic body, have blinked their way from 9:00 to 9:30 to fuck-all, and his only valuable contributions to his English assignment as yet have been a meticulously underlined heading and sundry crossed-out scribbles.
Rin fights the urge to shriek, punch the table and then spontaneously start gyrating against the chair or something, instead limiting himself to muttering a steady stream of profanities under his breath as his eyes scan, for the billionth time, over the poem he's supposed to be critically analyzing. He sighs and runs a hand through his hair, displacing his hair tie and shaking stray strands loose over his forehead. Jesus fuck, isn't Watanabe supposed to be inundating them with bloody Shakespeare or whatever it was that starred in English teachers' wet dreams?
And yet, a nearly unbeknownst, caustic smirk, here we are.
Almost involuntarily, he mouths the words from memory, his lips curving along the syllables with the facile flow of repetition. His finger traces over the print of the text, like maybe the noir of the ink will transude his skin and somehow explain the cabalistic magnetism of the verse. He glares through hooded eyes as if sheer assiduity can construe just what it is that has him somehow unable to just slam his books shut and call it a day already.
Some say the world will end in fire,
some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire,
I hold with those who favor fire—
"Matsuoka!"
The sound makes him jump about three feet in the air and effectively demolishes anything close to a copacetic submission he'd managed to cobble together in his cogitation. He internally groans, slumping down on his desk. He knows that voice.
"What do you want," he grouses, not bothering to raise his head from the desk when, sure enough, Mikoshiba bursts in three seconds later without so much as a by your leave. The last thing he needs to add to his shitfest of a day is the swim captain's entirely unwarranted exuberance.
"What I want is for you to drop the attitude," Mikoshiba says, frowning briefly at Rin's lack of welcome before livening up again. "And to get some train fare ready."
"….?"
Train fare?
If Mikoshiba is taking them on another trip around town to rescue stray cats stuck in trees, wherein he's going to have to extract scratching, yowling tabbies from trees because you're built for it, Matsuoka, Rin swears he's going to send his captain's limp-dick nudes to Gou.
So he just raises a questioning eyebrow, contingency plan at the ready, and almost gets jabbed in the eye with the piece of paper Mikoshiba waves at him.
"Look at this, look at this and tell me this isn't the best idea in Samezuka captaincy history!"
Rin can barely make out the heading on the pamphlet that is being brandished in his face because his captain is literally quivering with excitement.
The Training Camp from Hell – Samezuka Edition!
"I was... ermm, having a chat with Gou-kun after joint practice yesterday, and I managed to get her to brief me on Iwatobi training regimen," Mikoshiba starts talking before Rin has opportunity to ask him why this plan of his sounds like the title of a bad porno. "Most of their lineup is pretty basic, but there was one thing that got my attention."
...
Wait.
"They're swimming long distances in the sea to build endurance because it's Iwatobi tradition or something," his captain tells him, waving a dismissive hand. "But the point is, there's no way I'm letting our team fall behind."
Rin suddenly has a very, very bad feeling, a sick churning in his gut making him want to throw up.
"So," a self-satisfied grin, mercifully oblivious to Rin's steadily intensifying nausea, is flashed in his face, "We're giving it a Samezuka twist."
Okay, he's now sure he's going to puke. The only thing he's confused about is whether he should aim at his stupid fucking assignment, or Mikoshiba's stupid fucking face.
"…I'm not interested in copying some lame shit they're doing."
For a moment, his aloof veneer cracks, wide-eyed panic gaping through, leaving Rin scrambling to pick up the pieces, glue it all back together before anyone has time to blink and notice the difference. "And I'm not dragging myself to some deserted island just because you want to stare at my sister in a swimsuit."
He's started breathing harder, fidgeting more, but he's managed it. This time.
"I don't know who you think you are, Matsuoka, but I'm sure as fuck not letting you sabotage the interests of everyone else just because you don't have an iota of team spirit," Mikoshiba barks at him, finally losing his patience with Rin's bitchiness. "You're doing this with everyone else, or you're off the team."
"…"
"…"
Motherfuck.
Since every single fucking agency of karma is out to fuck his life like it's a gratis hooker or something, Rin should have known he'd lost this one before it had even begun. The belated realization does absolutely nothing to stop him from staring the captain down for a full, tense minute out of sheer stubbornness before he shunts his gaze off to the side, exhaling through clenched teeth in irritation. Seriously, fuck Mikoshiba and his coercive machinery.
"…Whatever," he mutters, scratching the back of his neck, grateful that the movement obfuscates the tremble of his fingers and the dampness of his palms. Whatever. He doesn't even care what he's gotten himself into, he just wants the other boy gone. "Now, I have a shit-ton of homework that's not going to do itself, so if you would kindly leave me to it…"
It's only when Mikoshiba shuts the door behind him with a cheery I knew you'd come around that the algid shiver of absolute dread that had been biding its time during the conversation makes its way, full-force, down Rin's spine. And because of fucking course he's Matsuoka Rin and he has to fuck himself over in every single way known to mankind, another incommodious thought follows at its heels.
That was a Haruka thing he just did, wasn't it?
Shit, he feels a scream of frustration aggrandize low in his throat. It was totally a Haruka thing.
So Rin was right. Water-obsessed freaks are contagious.
Fabulous. Any day now, he's going to wake up with an inexplicable, all-encompassing craving for mackerel and Makoto's dick.
And the fucking icing on the goddamn cake is that he can't even seek a sabbatical from the water-freak pathogens because Mikoshiba refuses to get it through his thick skull that there's not enough room in the world for Haruka and himself, let alone on some uninhabited island where the odds of running into him are ten to one.
This is just fucking great.
"Ummm … senpai?" Nitori's voice pipes up from somewhere behind Rin. "If you don't want to break your fifth pencil of the night, you might want to press a little less hard?"
Rin can in no way comprehend exactly why the passage of another hour finds him unmoving in his seat, fingers clenched convulsively around said pencil, still skewering his long-suffering paper. In light of events just transpired, he should fuck it all to hell, maybe go for an exigent run and then sink into bed, mercifully too drained to think of the horror-movie carousel his life is rapidly mutating into.
But he isn't.
He's sitting here, and he's thinking about it.
Theoretically, he knows that he has little to fear. He's stronger than Haruka, he's a better fucking swimmer than Haruka, and he knows (he knows) that if it ever came down to a confrontation between the two of them, he'd easily come out the victor. It was common knowledge. Isn't that what even the fucking poem says?
…
Stop fucking kidding yourself, Rin.
Like an ill-favored, arctic draught, the latter half of the verse creeps into his recall.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate,
to say that for destruction; ice
is also great, and would suffice.
And that sums it all up for Rin, doesn't it. In breviloquent, yet somehow dactylic terms, it tells Rin what he really knows.
In actuality, he has every reason to be scared.
"Nitori," he returns amicably. "Go fuck yourself with a cactus."
Rin can't sleep.
He's in his hotel room, muscles aching after a grueling day of long-distance swimming and dying to just roll over and sink into the blessed oblivion of syncope. But turning on the air conditioning when he was still soggy from a day largely spent submerged had been practically asking for a cold, and he had consequently demurred. So here he is now, lying in bed with the windows open and the white chintz curtains barely fluttering in the fluctuant breaths of breeze that stir in the quiescent air from time to time. It is the kind of sultry, balmy night reserved for festival evenings, the muggy stillness carrying within itself the tepid foretelling of a summer typhoon.
In other words, even with the creak of the fan going at full speed and the long kicked-off sheets, it's pretty damn uncomfortable.
With a resigned groan, Rin rolls over and off the bed, and walks to the large window across the room. If he spends any more time in bed, growing increasingly attuned to the rustling of foliage and the chirping of crickets from outside, he's going to go crazy.
Oh, the irony.
Because the little indications Nature drops from under her spangled cloak; hints that she is, in fact, alive, are something Rin has eagerly gathered up, reveled in, been soothed by, right from his light-hazed days of Popsicles and laughs too loud and grins blinding bright. He can hardly believe these to be the same nuances that now exacerbate the itch crawling just under his skin.
He sighs and leans his elbows against the sill, resting on them as angles his torso out of the window to inhale deeply. The uniquely marine scent of flotsam and sea foam and salt sets his senses to tingling as he opens his eyes to the seafront that holds an otherworldly mien by night.
It's just another sweltering summer night in Japan, but everything looks different by the water.
By the water, he can imagine that none of it exists. That the vitriol and the antagonism that he's clung on to like poison ivy has all been washed away in the swell and ebb; that the solicitude the inimical presence of blue in the air had enveloped him in has dissipated in the coolness.
But because the world is not a wish-granting factory, and because that water-obsessed freak hasn't permitted Rin even the closure of actually coming face-to-face with him and finishing what he'd started that unbearably charged evening in the locker room, the itch stays. He's left to suck it up and deal with it, tamp down on the restlessness that rears its head somewhere in his chest and his spine and his fingertips all at once whenever the tell-tale smell of mackerel tints the air, without the swish of dark hair and the monotone of an apathetic voice to culminate in.
Rin lets out a long, low exhale. Maybe he should give up on the idea of sleep, and go trail his fingers through brine-water, feel the cold, grainy sand beneath his toes. Goodness knows he'll get more R&R that way.
How long has it been since he's done this?
The waves wash against the shore on just that side of high tide, and the occasional murky cloud momentarily obscures the pale glow of the moon as Rin skips a rock across the surface of the water, watching the breakers swallow it up. The sand he pushes his feet into is pleasantly cool and pliant under his weight as he leaves indentations trailing behind him in the course of his walk. Muffled by the background thrum of stoic Neptune, his disquiet seems somehow… bearable.
And whatever Haruka might taunt him with in his annoyance, it slowly dawns upon Rin in this moonlit promenade at ass-o-clock in the morning, that he loves the water just as much as his entrant.
Just in a different way.
Because for Rin, it isn't the water so much as what he can do with it. How he can cleave through the malleable insubstance and feel, fleetingly, weightless. And come out the other end to the resounding cheers of an audience, be lauded for chasing that floaty feeling.
Just in a different way.
Rin's soliloquy almost leads him to run headlong into a copse of date palms that straggle along his path, their skeletal shadows eclipsing the meager luminescence of the night. Swearing a blue streak at his subsequent stumble into the obscurant sedge, he braces against coarse bark for equilibrium and leverage enough to gingerly overstep the undergrowth and lumber into the nebulous clearing it shelters.
"What the—"
The gasp leaves his mouth before he can stifle it; because here, on this forgotten stretch of beach, at ass-o-fucking-clock in the morning, someone is there. A pale-skinned figure is standing at the edge of a little inlet of sea, body poised to dive in. Very familiarly poised…
"Forgot your swimsuit, Haru?" Rin quashes his first, overwhelming urge to avert his eyes from the bare, resplendent form before him, his unashamed, unclothed body almost shimmering in the moonlight, by rending the suddenly loaded silence with a cocky jab.
He sees the shoulders before him tense— Rin dares not look any further south— but Haruka doesn't deign to turn around, or give any other indication that he's heard him. Just when Rin is about to advance another snarky comment, because it's Haruka and how can he not goad him further at every opportunity he gets, a barely audible, flat, "it got wet," comes in reply.
"…Tch."
Rin is not sure how to reply to this disconcertingly matter-of-fact retort, so he settles for clicking his tongue in annoyance. Somehow, this emotion is so easy to procure, when it comes to the other boy, that he reverts to it like it's his default setting every time Haruka's bluntness throws him. And everything about the brunet seems to spark the incandescence simmering just under Rin's façade— that aggravatingly unruffled cobalt of those eyes, like a window into the ocean at its calmest, the way his skin seems to glow like rose quartz in the silvery pool of light that filters through the leafy canopy, that bleaches the sand to white and the trees to ghostly frameworks.
As he always had, and more strikingly so in this stolen, illusory moment, Haruka reminds Rin of a poem; what with the flowing planes of his alabaster body, stark against the dimness of twilight and his aquamarine pools of eyes like an effervescent spring, that say everything and nothing all at once. The delicate undulations of his physique, vignetting into the night, sieve out a verse from his distant recall.
Where the mind is without fear, and the head is held high,
where knowledge is free.
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
by narrow domestic walls,
where words come out from the depth of truth.
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection.
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
into the dreary desert sand of dead habit.
Where the mind is led forward by thee
into ever-widening thought and action.
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
"Have you even been training? You still look as weak as ever," he says hastily, maybe too histrionically, even, to deviate his train of thought from the cesspool it would invariably lead him into, and determinedly disregards the surge of satisfaction that swells through him when he spies the head twitch that means he's successfully getting on Haruka's nerves.
"If you're done staring at me, leave already."
The answer is pitched no differently from the rest of their conversation. It speaks of no lilt of innuendo, Rin's rationality assures him of it, cool down, mind over matter, but his hackles nevertheless stand to attention with the threat of it. Because this is Haruka, and every syllable that falls from his lips is rife with threat, howsoever veiled.
"I wasn't staring at you," he bristles, and maybe something will transpire normally for once in their fucked-up dynamic. Maybe this will be the part where Haruka turns around, sapphire eyes spelling out acquittal and absolution, and tell him, with no hint of mirth in them, that he was joking; so he snickers in anticipation. "What, you think I've never seen a guy in the buff before?"
But Haruka is silent, the same, heavy silence that bespeaks a thousand and one contemptuous jabs that he can't be bothered to verbalize. And fuck anyone who tells Rin he hasn't a shred of intuition, because he can read Haruka's thoughts, clear as cut glass, right now.
Like you weren't staring that day?
You're pathetic, Rin.
A murky cloud drifts over the milky orb suspended in the night sky, and casts their little world of a littoral clearing into sudden half-light.
And something inside of Rin just. Snaps.
Splinters and fragments the moment the argentine glow casting the form before him into a untouchable, unearthly lustre is eclipsed; the moment the imperious sceptre keeping him and his lupine instincts at bay ceases to luminesce. And the incendiary realization that no matter what he does, what he becomes, Haruka will always be one step ahead, eyes icy and filled with contempt as he watches Rin flounder from atop his pedestal stabs through him anew.
It's as if his life is playing back to him on a reel, and he's reliving his own movements from a previous experience as film-Rin and himself both advance, limbs almost unconscious of their own kinesis. In slow motion, they close the distance between themselves and Haruka in three long strides, in a decelerated haze they grab Haruka's shoulder and yank it around so they face each other, and they project their frustration.
"Stop it."
For a split second, shock flits across those characteristically expressionless features, and Rin sees his own vicious expression reflect in ultramarine mirrors before they flit away from him like there is so much better to see in the world. So he digs his fingers in harder, recalls the fleeting attention attention because he's had enough, enough.
"Stop looking at me with that fucking— condescending look on your goddamn face," he half-screams the threat of querulous tears burning behind his eyes, the turbulent roiling in his chest echoed by the heavens as they split apart, weighty rain-diamonds cascading down upon the two of them. Rin vaguely, inanely recalls this phenomenon's literary nomenclature. Pathetic fallacy.
How fitting.
"Stop looking at me like I'm the same annoying kid from Iwatobi Swim Club, I'm— fucking different now, do you get it? Just—," and fuck, why are his hands shaking? "Recognize me as your rival, already!"
"…Is that really what you think?" Haruka finally says, a long moment after Rin has exhausted his rant. A gale has started up, whipping obsidian locks of drenched hair about his face, and there's a queer catch in his voice. Something stirs in the lacustrine of his eyes when he echoes himself. "Is that really what you want?"
That temperature has dropped like a rock, but Rin feels a strange blaze clawing at his insides as he scrambles for an answer to what the unrelenting midnight gaze asks of him. He can't think, the heat reaching almost unbearable proportions now, and it's indistinguishable amidst the howl of the wind and the pelt of rain, whether it's emanating from his own, slowly combusting body, or from Haruka, who's standing too close, too close.
"Rin…," Haruka breathes, and Rin can hear the soft call, sharp as a knell, even over the typhoon.
He doesn't know who takes the step forward, but all at once, Haruka's downturned mouth is the only thing in his field of vision, that unfairly captivating, downright enticing mouth. Out of the corner of his eyes, he sees onyx eyelashes flutter closed at the first, tentative brush of their trembling lips—
"What the fuck, Haru?" Rin staggers back, and it takes him a moment to spit this derision out. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?"
"Only what you wanted me to."
Rin is not sure he's meant to catch what Haruka mutters under his breath, and he's not sure of the wisdom of rounding on him, and in the absence of clothing, grabbing onto his shoulders in absolute, unbridled fury, in light of events just transpired; but excuse his reasoning for being somewhat shot after he's almost been kissed by someone who he thought saw him as nothing more than an annoying hurdle between himself and his enjoyment of the water.
He wants to shake Haruka, cock his fist back and fucking punch Haruka, wants to demand of him just how he dares be so presumptuous, but what comes out instead is, "What is your level, Haru? Why can't I ever catch up with you?"
Haruka doesn't have an extensive range of facial expressions, unless you count not having one as an expression in itself. But now, now his brows furrow and slant into a dark plane of strife, his aquamarine orbs spit sparks, and a dull flush dusts the high of his cheekbones as he retorts. "That's all you care about, isn't it?"
And Rin's not sure, he's never heard it before, but Haruka almost sounds angry. Not just exasperated, or irritated, but actual, proper angry. It translates in the way he shakes off Rin's grip in a swift, sinuous twist of his torso, and sweeps him one last scathing look before whipping around and taking off in the opposite direction.
That leads to…
"Oi, Haru, wait! It's high tide, do you wanna fucking drown?"
Rin sprits after the rapidly disappearing figure, but it seems like the training Haruka has, in actuality, been doing, has chosen the most inopportunemoment to pay off, and he has barely reached the shore when a quickly subsiding ripple belies the other's leap into the swell of the waves.
"You're fucking crazy," he mutters, rooted to the spot in disbelief, salt and sand granules flecking his face, making his eyes sting.
An icy paralysis suddenly spreads from his heart to the peripheries of his body. The sheer brute might of the heaving body of water before him has him hurtling back through Time's kaleidoscope, sending a gelid reminder of his powerlessness against the ocean shuddering up his spine. The acrid sharpness of pure, unadulterated fear rises to his tongue, for a moment.
"The ocean," he whispers to himself, "has the power to take everything from you in a single moment."
And then he braces himself, because goodness knows there's only one thing to be done between Haruka and himself when one of theme jumps headlong into the water.
And goodness knows he isn't letting the ocean steal anything else from him.
When Rin had briefly pondered death in his father's wake, he'd always imagined this to be the worst kind possible— choking, inhaling gulps of brackish water, muscles screaming from the struggle against imminent capsize, tossed about on the breakers like a limpet. It was the fate whose threat had constituted most of the castigations he'd endured from his mother after having ventured too far into the sea, but he finds, strangely enough, that the long-engrained fear only lasts up until the first lash of salt-water against his flesh, burned away by molten-steel resolve. As the water engulfs him, as his muscles accommodate to the tidal pull, he stops wildly careening and starts swimming, really swimming, towards Haruka, the dark buoy of his head intermittently visible against the tumult.
"Fuck, wait, Haru!" he yells as he gains on him, the splash of water loud in his ears, fighting to hold his own against the cresting sheets of sea. They're both going to drown, at this rate, but Rin isn't even remotely surprised when his outcry fails to evoke a response.
A jagged flash of lightning splits the sky, then, and Rin swears he sees the other boy look back at him. Look at him with the same smolder in his eyes he'd seen one unforgettable time before, the one that says don't cry if you lose.
Oh.
His mouth curls into a snarl as he bows his head, redoubling the exertion of his strokes, more focused now on overtaking Haruka than on just reaching him. His vision tunnels, the world narrows down into adjoining lanes of crimson and cobalt and the grisly gray of unquiet ocean, and he barely feels the path-deviating currents swirling around them, so consumed is he by the kindling that propels him, that blazes with every single shred of rage, of confusion, of frustration that has haunted his sleeping and waking moments alike.
He feels drunk, riding on the high of it as his heart threatens to beat out his chest, as his entire body thrills and tingles, not from the damp or the cold, but from the rush of the combatant presence at his side, neck-and-neck. Because this is familiar territory, he knows where he stands, what to do when they sound out, and it's just as simple as the water and bending it to your will the fastest.
I'm not letting you win this one, Haru.
When they finally run aground, it's more of a surprise than anything to Rin, who lurches ashore, sinking to his knees in the wet sand, and is almost knocked off-balance when another body knocks into him with oceanic leverage.
"Watch it," he mutters, instinctively steadying the other boy. The rain has let up some, now, and as a few slivers of watery moonlight reappear from beneath the retreating clouds, they throw Haruka's features into sharp relief. The flush of his cheeks has darkened to dusty rose, his chest is heaving with exertion, and it's a generally inviting picture, but Rin's erratic breath hitches in his throat and stops altogether when he takes in his eyes.
His eyes.
The tetrammine is, uncharacteristically, ensconced in flames.
It brings back, in a sickening rush, every reason Rin's pushed him away all those times before.
It also reminds him of exactly why he jumped into the water behind him in the first place.
All this while, he'd been trying not to get sucked in.
A sharp inhale. No.
He shoves Haruka away, down.
And then he speaks, as if empty words would somehow dispel the compelling, near-hypnotic draw that was steadily reeling him in.
"Fuck, do you know— do you have any idea what a dick move you just made?" he stops to catch his breath, somehow arrest the futility of it all,
because all this while, he'd also known somewhere inside him, that he was already, inescapably, in the eye of the vortex.
"Do you know what you did to—," he tries again, then, "oh, fuck it."
Because maybe Rin can fight ocean currents, and maybe he can overcome tidal waves, but he's powerless, powerless against the energy the surges from every inch of his body, attracts him inexorably, magnetically, to the pole of opposing, electric-blue energy where he knows he mustn't tread. And he doesn't know why this fact has presented itself to him so absolutely in this moment, whether or not it has anything to do with the fact that he's just literally chased Haruka across an ocean, but it's there and Rin can't turn his face from it any more.
So, for once in his life, he does fuck it all to hell, he does flick his sodden hair off his face, he does lean forward and down, and, breathless, feverishly shivery, he kisses Haruka.
Rin has kissed people before. Fuck, he's kissed people before, but when his quivering, chapped lips press against Haruka's, it feels on his last breath like he's slowly, deliciously combusting in the passion of the first kiss he's never had. It feels like their minds, bodies, souls are fusing and amalgamating, a blitzkrieg of carmine and cerulean flame entwining in the slick slide of their tongues. Haruka's mouth tastes like stealing from his mother's sweet jar, like covert dips in the deeper parts of the sea, like trance-inducing narcotic, like everything beautiful and hedonistic and forbidden, and in that moment, Rin doesn't understand how he's ever existed without needing the scorching pressure like he needs air to breathe.
He only leaves go when the need for air grows acute, letting up a few centimeters so that he can take in Haruka's appearance, cheeks stained with flush, hair askew. His pupils look like everything Rin feels, blown huge and black with the viscosity of molten coal tar. The overt sexuality of it sends a shiver of desire all down Rin's body.
"Only what I wanted, huh?" he throws Haruka's words from before back in his face. It's anyone's guess as to who the winner of their undeclared competition is, but the feeling that's inundating him, blinding him with its intensity, Rin can only liken to a winner's high.
"Shut up."
Haruka, Rin is pleased to note, sounds as breathless as he feels. His hands, nevertheless, breach against Rin's chest as he pushes him away. "Get off."
But Rin's head is still buzzing, some heady cocktail of adrenaline and arousal and Haruka coursing through his veins, and it pushes him to shove a knee between Haruka's legs, press upwards. No.
"Rin, stop—," he tries harder to separate them, but the sharp intake of breath that cuts off his sentence belies his reaction and Rin smirks.
"Why, Haru? Just admit it already," he descends back down to claim those upturned lips again, stealing both their breaths with the bruising force. "You act like you're so far out of my league, like you're way too good to be bothered with me, but admit it," he grinds his hips down, aligning the hardening ridge he feels underneath him with his own. "You. Want. Me."
He puts his lips to Haruka's ear to nip and lick at the shell of it, and the admission bursts forth from him like a prayer, too heavy to be suppressed any longer. "Just as much as I want you."
Haruka says something to that, but it's such a low murmur that it's lost in the pound of blood in Rin's ears as he divests himself of his soaked t-shirt. He doesn't want to hear anything the other boy has to say, anything that might bring him back to his senses.
Anything that fragments into …like this…
He pins the other body down with his own, lets his hands trail over every inch of the subtle musculature while his teeth bite down, with a sudden return to ferocity, on the lithe curve of his neck.
He revels in the muffled moan that seems wrenched out of Haruka at that, revels in the arch of Haruka's back when his tongue and fingers tease those indecently pink nipples into hard little peaks, in the almost-sigh that Haruka breathes out when Rin's fingers wrap around the turgid flesh of his cock.
"This is between you and me, Haru," he mutters, summing up the complexity of their skewed relationship into one, poignant whisper. "No one else matters."
Rin feels so incredibly, absurdly powerful as he sucks a trail of purple-black bruises down Haruka's torso, down, down over the ivory jut of his hip, stopping millimeters from the swell of his arousal, that he can't help but breathe out an exhilarated laugh over the head of it, making it twitch. The control he's always craved, the control he has with the other boy at his mercy, with pushing his buttons the way he always seems to push Rin's; is intoxicating, and he wants more, more, more of it, something to satiate the ravenous wildfire raging in his chest.
So he engulfs Haruka's dick in the heat of his mouth, sucks it down as deep as it will go. The rough drag of it scrapes at the back of his throat and instantly sets his eyes to watering, but the sound Haruka makes at that and the consequent rush of desire so strong it nearly has his knees buckling, makes it all worth it.
"Ngh—!"
Even suppressed by the barrier of his hands, the little whimpering noises Haruka is making leak out and direct themselves straight to Rin's fraying nerves, blowing out his pupils and making his dick grow impossibly harder. He doesn't know how, even when he's laid out and completely at Rin's mercy, Haruka still manages to affect him like this. Fuck, it makes him angry.
So angry that he hums around the cock in his mouth and swirls his tongue around the head, hissing in satisfaction at the salty tang of precome that instantly fills his mouth, at the way he has to hold down the hips that jerk up into the suction, at the soft groan of disappointment when he pulls off.
"That good, huh?" His smirk now seems permanently affixed to his face. Haruka just tilts his head away, loosening his death-grip on fistfuls of sand.
Don't you fucking dare.
Rin grabs his chin and forces the cyan gaze to center on him again, witness him coat his fingers in saliva.
"Look at me," his voice is low, dangerous before he melds their mouths together again, needing the sensation, the thrill of overpowering lust that melts over him like slow chocolate, to convince himself that this isn't a desert mirage, that Haruka won't disappear into wisps of powder-blue mist the moment he pushes too hard.
Slowly, savoring each point of contact, he traces down Haruka's body with his fingers, pausing to flick briefly at a nipple— the other boy gasping into the kiss— before he pushes Haruka's knee up and out, spreading his legs to nudge a spit-slick digit at his entrance.
The action seems to galvanize the other boy, who had remained tolerably malleable until now, and he jolts, grabbing Rin's hand as his eyes fly wide open.
"Rin, no, stop it!"
For the first time in the years he's known him, Rin sees him look… panicked. Afraid. Scared of what Rin can do to him.
Good, something savage in him, purring in satiation, whispers in his head. Let him mirror how he always makes you feel.
Rin makes to consolidate his thought with a sharp bite to Haruka's lip, one he knows will make him gasp gratifyingly, but it's fate, it has to be, the way their gazes catch on each other as he leans in.
The way the distress in those indigo orbs makes him stop short.
This is what you wanted, isn't it? Soothing, a sharp, acerbic whisper sounds somewhere in his disarrayed consciousness. Go on, then, take it. You know he can't stop you.
He can't stop me.
"You can't stop me," Rin says under his breath. The words are strangely invigorating, and he's about to follow through on them, but that damn look in those eyes inhibits him again.
It's fear.
Haruka is scared of Rin.
Rin is hurting Haruka.
No.
No no no no no.
He doesn't want it like this, doesn't want Haruka to…
"…Whatever," he mutters, "it's not even worth it."
He pushes himself off Haruka, climbs off and puts a few feet between them, turning his face to the waves lapping at the shore. He doesn't need to be Makoto to read, without looking, the confusion the other boy's eyes are spelling out.
"It's not a fair fight. I'm not interested in winning over some guy who looks like he hasn't worked out in four years," he takes a few steps into the water, feeling the waves wash around his ankles. He doesn't dare to turn around, knows his expression will give him away. "We'll settle this after you've built some muscle."
He hears the shift in the sand, hears the thud of footsteps leaving gouges in the soft ground, but doesn't make much of it until something is grabbing his arm and whirling him around. He's about to shove Haruka away, maybe spit out a mouthful of abuse at him, but he can barely let out a gasp before his mouth is otherwise occupied.
Soft lips are covering his own.
Haruka is kissing him.
Almost reflexively, Rin's arms come up to encircle Haruka's waist, and he has a sudden, absurd flash of how romantic this must look, them intertwined in the middle of the sea by the pink-pale moonlight.
Romantic, when they're anything but.
Haruka's kisses are a perfect mirror of himself— slow, sensual; and to Rin, it feels like floating. Floating in an endless aquamarine haze, with nothing but the tranquility encompassing him, with nothing but his own feelings buoying him.
"We settle this now," he says, when they break the kiss, eyes ablaze in turquoise flame. They're daring him to challenge it, to walk out again. The expression is all the reassurance he needs.
"Fine," the predatory grin spreads over his face again. "But don't forget, you asked for it."
And with that, he's pushing Haruka back down, kissing him like he's drowning, running his hands over his body as the smoky heat obliterates the last vestiges of his self-control. In a fever-haze, he spreads his legs again, strokes a finger over his puckered rim, drinks in the way Haruka gasps and tries to twist away despite himself.
Rin grits his teeth, because what, what right does Haruka have to make Rin feel like this, to build him up to breaking point and then try to run?
"No, that's your forté, isn't it?" Haruka bites out, taunting, and Rin realizes he's thought out loud. "Running awa— ah!"
The words dissolve into a moan as Rin abruptly shoves a finger inside him, shutting the mouth that always has him at a disadvantage in this new, failsafe way.
"Rin, wait!" Haruka is struggling, really struggling, now, and Rin has to fight hard to keep his position. "Go slower, I'm serious."
"No," Rin's teeth glint in an animalistic grin as he subdues his combatant with his advantage in body weight. Before he leans in to claim his mouth again, he curls his fingers, just to witness the way Haruka throws his head back, stifles the obscene noise leaving his mouth behind his hand. "No, you're not."
The downright dirty kiss that follows swallows both their moans as Rin unforgivingly scissors his fingers inside of the other boy, the sheer heat of his insides compelling him to press his own, uncomfortably confined erection against Haruka's thigh for momentary relief.
"Hmmm, what's this?" he murmurs when he pulls away, a thin stand of saliva connecting the lips. He takes in Haruka's ravished appearance, lips swollen, burning eyes glaring daggers at him, hands still pushing ineffectually at his chest. "You act all cold around everyone, like nothing ever affects you, but someone just comes along and touches you the right way, and you moan like a slut for it, Haru?" he bites down his neck again, makes him flinch, before breathing hot again the wound. "How lewd."
He doesn't know where the words are coming from, he doesn't know what is possessing him to growl them, low and dirty, into Haruka's ear, except that he likes the way Haruka reinforces his efforts to shove him away at that, and flushes a deeper rose; that he wants to yank him off his pedestal and lay his undeniable humanity bare for himself to see, to take comfort in.
And so he does. He flips Haruka over, pins his arms to his sides when he tries to scramble out of the vulnerable position, and kicks off his shorts and underwear, hissing at the cool air against his heated arousal.
"Told you you should start working out more," he mutters, lining himself up with a few cursory swipes of a saliva-slick hand over his dick.
"No, Rin, let me—," Haruka's voice sounds different from anything Rin's ever heard before, pitched an octave lower and shaking enough to break as he almost displaces Rin in his resistance when he feels the blunt pressure against his entrance, who manages to immobilize him by sheer force of will. "Oi, are you listening?"
"Isn't it obvious?— ngh!" Rin starts pushing in, the sudden, constrictive heat around his cock so intense he cuts himself off with a grunt, feeling almost faint from the intensity of it. "I'm not."
"Ahhh!" Haruka's pained cry is the loudest Rin's ever heard him be, and he feels a surge of his old, savage satisfaction that he's the only one who's ever heard this, who's ever seen this side of Haruka where he's helpless to the sensory overload, where he has no choice but to take what he's given.
Not that he's doing so uncomplainingly.
"Just— stop— fighting— already," Rin gets out as he begins to thrust in earnest after giving them both a moment to adjust, with Haruka leaving deep claw marks in the sand as he tries to gain enough leverage to turn over, propel himself away.
Away from Rin.
For some reason, the thought infuriates him, fury burning white-hot inside him as he snaps his hips faster, the pace brutal, now. He's leaving bruises, it faintly registers, mottled splotches of purple-black marring the alabaster of his hips. Fuck, Rin hopes they'll stay, that the yellowing, peeling skin of them will remind Haruka that Rin can do this, that Rin is just as powerful as him, now.
"Stop fighting— nnn— you?" Haruka gasps between each punishing thrust. "Then how would you live?"
Rin has no reply to the mockery, which strikes somewhere disconcertingly deep inside him, so he pulls out with a snarl and turns him onto his back to resume pounding into him with renewed vigor, determined to make Haruka forget his own name, let alone coherency.
"Does it hurt, Haru?" he barely even realizes he's framing a sentence, hardly recognizes the voice that rasps it out, lust-shot and feral. "Tell me it hurts."
He needs to hear it, needs ratification of what he's doing, ratification that it's rendering Haruka as inarticulate as himself, unable to choke out anything except the veracity of a yes, yes Rin; that Haruka is accepting it.
"Fuck you."
It's the first time he's heard the other boy swear, but, really, what did he expect?
And what other way would he have it?
The abuse just spurs him on, his mind gone now, and he can just about get it together enough to respond.
"Oh?" he angles his hips, driving right into the spot that had made Haruka arch and moan deliciously on his fingers, as if to remind him of their position. "Pretty sure the opposite is happening, here."
And then he shuts his eyes, shuts out any retort the other boy might have had to that, and gives himself over to base instinct. He lets it drive his actions as his hands twine into Haruka's hair, as they force his palms away from his face so his tongue can delve into the open mouth, the kiss more a haphazard clash of tongues and teeth. He opens his eyes a fraction so that he can see the face Haruka's making, eyes screwed shut in a pantomime of euphoria, lips forming around words.
It's a while before Rin realizes he's panting what he's all but missed, before.
Not like this…
He blocks it out, mind focused on this slide of their sweat-damp skin, the breathy little noises that his thrusts punch out of Haruka, and the curling low in his belly that warns him of impending orgasm.
But he can't.
He'll be damned if he gives himself over to the electrifying rush of sensuality first. He curls his fingers around Haruka's dripping cock, and strokes in tandem with each jarring slam of his hips. The strangled "Rin— don't!" that comes from beneath him only fuels him to grip tighter, twist his wrist at the head, just the way he likes it done to himself.
And just when he's about to succumb to the wave of fiery, all-consuming pleasure that has all the muscles in his lower half tensing, he feels it— arms coming up to clutch tight around his shoulders with a broken cry of too much, too much, Rin; no more.
The high keen of "Rin— Rin, coming—!" resounds in his ears as blunt nails rake a burning path down his back before something warm splatters his abdomen. After that, it's nigh impossible to keep from hurtling over the edge, keep from letting paralyzing, white-hot pleasure sweep over him and take him under.
"Fuck, Haru!"
His hips stutter and the forearms bracing him tremble for a moment before giving way, leaving him to collapse on top of the body beneath him.
"Rin, you're heavy."
The annoyed complaint is the first thing that ushers him back into the realm of the living after his body has stopped shuddering from his high.
"…Yeah."
Finding he can't venture forth anything more substantial just yet, Rin settles for rolling over and letting Haruka up. Now that sundry figments of his sense have resurfaced, an absolute, black dread inundates him.
What. Has he done.
How. How is he supposed to face Haruka, after this? How is he supposed to live with himself?
He casts about for something to talk about, something that can reintroduce some semblance of normalcy into their convoluted dynamic, tell him where the lines stand now.
He's coming up completely, frustratingly blank until he spares the heavens a despairing glance, and and conversation, somehow, isn't a forced flow any more.
"…Haru, look at the sky."
The venture is as simple as it was when he was twelve and untarnished and childishly excited at the night sky that one could only ever see in Iwatobi. He's half-expecting Haruka to ignore him, maybe even turn around and hit him, but he complies wordlessly, and Rin can feel the shift in the sand as he tilts his head up, not moving from his side.
They share the view for a silent moment. Rin suspects that, like himself, the sheer majesty, the quiet power of the galactic canopy sheltering them has bereft Haruka of all words. The clouds have all cleared away in the wake of he storm, giving them an unobstructed view of the velveteen cloak of Nyx and the million and one diamonds that glimmer from its folds.
"That stars look different, back in Australia," he finally says, then points at familiar patterns. "But I think that's Ursa Minor, and that's Cancer. It's your sign, isn't it?"
"I didn't know you knew about stargazing," Haruka replies, voice back to normal, now, but it's as if their ephemeral union has finally liquidized the wall between their spirits, because the realization that Haruka is trying just as hard as him, somehow… comes through to him. Haruka is saying you remembered, and he understands it.
"I watched constellations a lot when I was in Australia," he tells him softly, and because there's so much they don't know, so many little things like this they've missed about each other, Rin lets just that little bit of honesty past him. "It felt like watching the night sky brought me closer to you, because it was one thing we still shared even though we were on different continents."
He abruptly leans up on his elbows, then, pushes himself to his feet, suddenly ungainly and awkward and embarrassed at his show of vulnerability, and chances a surreptitious glance at Haruka while pulling on his uncomfortably damp clothes. He looks normal, thank goodness for that.
But what of them now?
What of them now he's made this confession and dispelled any ambiguity in his show of feeling towards the other boy?
He grits his teeth, swallows, then stretches out his hand.
"Wanna see a sight you've never seen before?"
His palms are clammy with sweat. A cold chill makes its way down his spine, constricting his chest with painful intensity in the minute it takes Haruka to accept his hand, still half-convinced of repudiation.
Together they take the handful of steps into the water, and stand submerged knee-deep in the scintillating mirror of the phosphorescent night sky. It feels like an otherworldly space, such a true mirror to the overhead empyrean, that if Rin tries hard enough, he can imagine that they're submerged knee-deep in the galaxy that exists beyond earthly confines, in a stolen moment in time where nobody can touch them, where they have multitudinous celestial bodies keeping their vigil.
"Haru…," he begins, then trails off when the sapphire gaze arrests him. There are innumerable things he wants to say, a maelstrom of feelings he wants to put into words, but he knows that each vocalization will only serve to entrap them further in this pernicious web of myriad, unresolved feelings; further than is wise of safe for either of them.
So he leans in, one last time, standing in the heart of embodied Time, where it doesn't count, presses their lips together once, chaste, and ends it. "…Goodnight."
Snatches of the poetry that finds personification in every contour of Haruka's person, in every lilt and dip of his mannerism, in his calm, ultramarine aura, flit through Rin's mind.
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high…
…where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
into the dreary desert sand of dead habit…
…for destruction, ice,
is also great,
and would suffice…
…into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
If only.
If only they could be free.
He knows he's crying before he even turns away, the diamonds of teardrops blending indistinguishably into the jewel-encrusted sky beneath him, but for once he makes no attempt to staunch the flow. And when he takes one, final, look back, Haruka's face almost makes him retrace his steps. Because, for a fleeting moment there, Rin thinks he sees those frozen aquamarine pools melt into liquescence that trickles out over the curve of his fine-boned cheek.
He can't return to make sure, though, because now it isn't a few, easily surpassable meters of space that separate them. It is an entire, star-studded, shimmering universe.