Sea Foam Stuck on the Rocks

by stalactice

All Rin wanted to do after class was eat dinner, finish up some homework, and then spend the rest of his evening practicing his 100m freestyle race for the upcoming prefecture tournament. Was that too much to ask for? Apparently so. And why was there a synchronized swimming team in Samezuka's pool?

10. Reluctant Revelations

"Sea Foam Stuck on the Rocks"

By stalactice

Disclaimer: If I owned anything from the 'Free!' universe I could actually make some money off of royalties. But, I don't and I do not claim otherwise. I have no associate with any of the musical artists mentioned below, but feel free to check out their stuff anyways. Please don't sue me. Carry on.

Musical Inspiration: "Fire Rides (Night Version)" by MØ, "X Amount of Words" by Blue October, "Sail" by C2 (Cover of AWOLNATION)

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Chapter 10: Reluctant Revelations

Pointing at the corner farthest from the concierge desk in the lobby of Umibe, Katya ordered firmly in her native tongue, "Stay there, don't touch anything, and don't say a word*."

"No complaints here," Kaz replied with his hands up in mock surrender and began to shake out his umpteenth cigarette for the day.

She interjected over her shoulder while she waited for her employer to finish with a guest, "And no smoking!" His dejected pout was enough to convince her he would not disobey her at the risk of sleeping outside. Really need to get him to quit…

Fukui Sachiko smiled serenely at Katya and hummed, "Back already, Katya-chan? I thought I gave you more than enough finances to work on this morning."

"Fukui-san, my brother," the teenager ignored the joke and jerked a thumb over her shoulder at the sulking figure in the corner, "needs a room for one night."

The older woman craned her neck around Katya's head to get a better look at the man tapping the kickboard for the step that separated the areas where indoor shoes were required and not. Katya scrunched her eyes shut and hoped he did not break anything. "Ah, I see," Fukui-san chirped before turning around and plucking a key from the farthest corner of her display. "This should do just fine for a night." Jet-black eyes slanted at the Russian man. "Would you mind translating for me, Katya-chan, so we can sort out the costs?"

Katya immediately lowered her head and folded her hands in a makeshift formal bow and stammered out something between a whisper and a ramble, "Please deduct whatever he owes from my paycheck for this month!" She did not need to change her vantage from the seam on the pristine floor to know that Fukui-san narrowed her eyes even more at Kazimir. Katya swore she heard her brother gulp.

"Well, if that's what you want to do, then I'm fine with it, Katya-chan," she remarked easily. When Katya tilted her head up slightly she found her employer offering a relaxing and genial smile. The woman extended the key out, but retracted it right as the young Russian moved to take it. "However, I still expect you to work with the same standard you usually have."

Katya nodded as quickly as her neck would allow without snapped off the spinal column. "Of course, Fukui-san," she assured.

"Wonderful," Fukui-san purred and slid the key across the counter. "He's quite a nice looking young fellow," she commented with the slightest hint of 'if only I were younger and unmarried' coloring her tone.

Though she desperately wished to smash her head against a table to forget that, the petite Russian knew there was not a surface hard enough to be up to the task. Katya wondered if Rin had as much difficulty keeping his sibling out of trouble as she did. From what little interaction she saw between Gou and Shizuku, the answer was a definite yes.

With a strained smile, Katya graciously accepted the key for one of Umibe's spare rooms – it was really only meant for one person, period – latched onto her brother's elbow (because he was the type to wander off and become completely lost), and dragged him towards his quarters for the next night. When they finally reached their destination, the synchronized swimmer offered they key to the former ice skater with a warning, "If you lose this, I'll tell Nikolai to steal all of your Advent treats."

Pouting, Kazimir plucked the chilly piece of metal from her grasp and murmured, put out, "Is there anything he won't do for you?"

Katya shrugged. "Nothing illegal or anything Mama wouldn't approve of."

"Papa know about it?"

"Nope. We're not stupid." Besides, Ekaterina added mentally while Kazimir fiddled with the lock, there was once a time he would have done the same for you. Maybe when Nikolai was old enough to understand his trust in his brother would solidify once more, but the impression of being cast aside as a six-year-old still burned.

"Jeez," Kaz hissed and jiggled the doorknob. "Why's this thing so stubborn?" A light click filled the hallway and he sighed, "Finally."

To a westerner, the room might as well have been a broom cupboard. But, it was perfect for what Kazimir needed without breaking Katya's limited bank. A mat with a clean set of white sheets folded crisp so the corners were perfect right angles sat in the middle of the room. On the wall perpendicular to the door was a modest counter and basin for washing up in the morning accompanied by small mirror.

"So," Kaz grunted through the silence, "talking…right?"

Katya sunk down onto the corner of the mat, draped her elbows across her knees, and quirked a brow at her brother as a silent confirmation to continue his explanation from earlier. The eldest Zolnerovich child heaved another long sigh and fumbled for his carton of cigarettes in his back pocket, setting it down on the counter behind him before his baby sister could tear into him again. His hand twitched at his side before he busied his fingers with playing with the belt loops of his jeans.

Kazimir sat next to Katya, shoulder to shoulder. He reeked of cheap cigarettes. Her eyes were no doubt bloodshot from being around him for such an extended period of time.

"You should quit that," she recommended blandly, not even bothering clarifying what 'that' is.

He understood what she meant, though, since he quietly hummed, "Yeah…"

The silence that followed was thick enough to cut with a knife, palatable to every sense. Kazimir deliberately directed his gaze to anything in the room other than Katya.

She asked over the growing lump in her throat, "When did the pain start to get worse?"

Kazimir scrunched his face up in thought (a look Nikolai learned to mimic early on) and clicked his tongue. "It was manageable until a couple months ago." He chuckled bitterly, "Mama finally told me to get some more medication, but, y'know, getting refills is tough, especially since I was already taking more than I probably should have." Katya raised a brow at him. How much more was 'more'? "When I talked with doctor, he said he had no problem with writing another prescription, but I needed to know the next dose up meant another price step."

"And that's where I came in," she filled in, voice softer than she anticipated.

Her brother snorted. "I held off as long as I could – and I would have gotten a job, I swear, if I knew I actually stood a chance – but Papa said… oh, what were his exact words?" The eldest son clenched his eyes shut and dropped his chin on a knee. "Ah! He said," Kaz continued with his story and pitched his voice even lower to parrot their father, "'Son, it's going to cost more money in the long run if you refuse to do anything about it.' I'm pretty sure he was implying like another injury or something like that."

"It's true, though," Katya breathed and almost laughed at her brother's impression of Ilya. She could even imagine him saying it behind a steaming cup of coffee at the kitchen table after dinner, the smell of grinds and still-warm chicken wafting through the air. "Do Papa and Mama know that you're asking me for money?"

Kaz nodded solemnly before stretching his arms above his head and dropping back onto the cot with a garbled grunt. "Yeah," he admitted and slung his forearm over his eyes, covering up his guilt. "They're the ones that recommended I get in contact with you."

Katya could not deny it stung. Blowing a raspberry at the ceiling, she rolled down as well. "How much do you need?" Had things occurred under different circumstances – like so many people wished for life to deal a different hand of cards – she was confident she would not even hesitate to give him more money. However, the scar of watching Nikolai tiptoe around emotions he was too young to understand and hearing their parents fret over Kaz not eating more than a few hundred calories a day still itched and clawed at her heart.

(The one where Katya blinked up at her brother in child-like wonder as he declared his ambitions and promises and had a front row seat to its demise oozed and bled the most, still. It hurt even more that she never really saw him try to get back up. Each time a new message popped up on her phone, the scab would be ripped off and she was left to stanch the wound.

Kazimir let her down.)

Katya clamped her teeth down on her knuckle, completely bypassing the small joint of her finger, and waited patiently for blood to seep through the skin. I don't want to deal with this right now, she confessed to her subconscious.

What we want to do and what is necessary are often two different things, it replied smoothly.

…Right.

With a full-bodied sigh, Katya calmly reasoned, "I already send you guys eighty percent of my paycheck each month. I can bump it up to ninety and still have enough in case I need emergency funds…" She felt Kazimir's gaze pierce through the top of her head in strange dichotomy of guilt for causing all of this and relief that he just might make it through the latest surge of pain. "But, it'll take a while for it to catch up since getting you a room here for a couple nights literally drains me of everything for this week."

"…Sorry," his voice broke and he smashed the pillow from above his head straight into his face.

Katya sighed, "Yeah…" The quiet was thick like a winter blanket, smothering both of them against the cot. Looking for anything to break the tension over their newly formed agreement, the brunette cleared her throat. "How's everyone been?"

Kaz hummed from beneath the pillow before coming up for air and shoving it under his head. "From what I can tell, they've been good. Mama and Papa are still working." He shrugged and chuckled, "Nikolai is excited about turning ten in a couple months and won't stop telling everyone about it."

Katya clicked her tongue against her teeth, "Of course he is. And let me guess: while he's trying to convince you how mature he is now that he'll be in the double digits, he's also milking out the last drops of being an innocent little nine-year-old."

"Bingo."

She allowed herself a short, dry bark of laughter. "Well, with puppy-dog eyes like his he'll probably manage it for a couple more years."

"Wouldn't put it past him."

The silence settled again and Katya practically choked on the stench of smoke next to her. "I have one request, though, for the increase." Kaz turned his head to face her. Katya met his eyes – blue-green against emerald – and stated with determination, "Quit smoking." His eyes widened like saucers and he opened his mouth to argue, but before he could get the words out, Katya cut him off, "Cold turkey. The money you save from not buying cigarettes – shitty ones, at that – will add up so you can save it for something else, like more maintenance medication if you ever get off of this one. Those are my conditions."

A flash of betrayal sparked in his eyes before he sat up and glared at the carton balanced on the counter. He gulped, "Fine."

Katya blinked at his back before shooting up and getting a better look at his features. "Really?" she inquired, voice spiking in disbelief.

"Yeah," Kaz replied as he pushed to a stand. He stalked over to the sink and tossed the carton in his palm a couple time before twisting around and handing it off to his sister. As an afterthought, he snapped his fingers and dug through his back pocket for his zip-lighter. "Here."

With tears threatening to brim in her eyes again (I refuse to cry this much in one day! a voice in her head aggressively pulled the plug on the water works), Katya gaped at her older brother. He's in that much pain…

Kaz nodded at her. "Take them," he ordered quietly. His voice was still gravelly from his last smoke. Katya pondered how long it would take for that to disappear. "I'm sure Mama and Papa will be thrilled to find out I've quit when I get back." He glanced out the side window at the sliver of the ocean visible between the frame and the wall of the next building over. "How long did it take them to find out about it, anyway?" he groaned.

"They knew from the get-go," Katya sniggered and stowed her newly obtained trinkets into her bag. She made a mental note to toss them both in the garbage when she got back to Ikagara that night. "You had no idea how much you smelled one time you came to the dinner table." She frowned and tapped her chin as she tried to remember when she first noticed the stench radiating off Kazimir. "I think it was around Papa's birthday in February or maybe it was March. After that, you just got sloppy with sticking your head out the window of your room."

Kazimir flinched though a tiny flicker of boyishness lit up before snuffing out in an instant. "Nikolai didn't tattle?"

Katya rolled her eyes. "Are you kidding? He'd rather chop off his arm," Kaz winced at the mental image and hissed through his teeth (he always was queasy with blood), "than give up his," she held up her finger and added air quotes, "'very cool older brother.' Plus, he knew that Papa and Mama already knew so there wasn't much to tattle on."

Shaking his head, the former skater raked a hand through his hair and Katya blanched as her brain filled in the brown hair with maroon. "Shit!" she exclaimed and shoved a hand into her duffel. "What time is it?! Where's my phone?!" Frantically, the brunette finally unzipped the bag completely and rummaged around her synchro gear.

She could practically hear Kaz raising an eyebrow at her. "Everything okay over there?"

After a couple failed attempts at flipping open the cover, Katya grabbed the piece of plastic (no doubt smearing her thumbprint across the crappy screen) and forced it up. Were she not so shocked at how little time she actually had left before she had to be back at Samezuka and Mikoshiba would kick Matsuoka out of the pool, Katya would have shrieked like a banshee. Instead, she promptly shoved her phone in the back pocket of her shorts and rattled off in one breath, "I have to train Matsuoka in twenty minutes–"

"I thought he was your tutor," Kazimir commented with befuddlement.

"He is," Katya grit through her teeth as she absentmindedly bounced on the balls of her feet, a flush of embarrassment crawling up her chest, "but I'll explain more of that later." As she stood mid-step through the door, her brother's lack of truly functional Japanese (which Matsuoka would find rich coming from her) struck her. "I'll leave a message with Fukui-san with what you like to eat for dinner and breakfast and I'll figure out what to do with you for lunch and dinner tomorrow and if you so much as make a peep that it is not to your taste, I'll personally eat all of your Advent candy," Katya rambled, green eyes growing harder and colder with each passing word.

Kazimir took his turn to roll his eyes. "Jeez," he moaned and raised his hands in mock surrender, "at this rate I should just give up on anything Christmas related. And I'll be a good kid, I promise."

"Good. See you tomorrow!" she hollered and promptly made a one-eighty and a dash towards the front desk to drop off a note for her employer. After checking to make sure her scrawl was somewhat legible, the Russian took off towards the train station.

This seems familiar, Katya told herself as she rocked back and forth waiting for the train to come to a halt.

---

Katya burst through the door of Samezuka's aquatic center, wincing as it hit the frame with a sharp thwang before slowly returning to its original position. Her thighs burned from running over five kilometers compressed within a matter of a couple hours with an occasional twitch until she finally caught her breath and collapsed onto her typical bench behind Matsuoka's diving block.

The redhead, still freshly drenched and dripping from his practice, raised a fine brow at her.

"How was," Katya gasped and removed her sandals before she sagged against the window, "practice?"

"Mikoshiba seemed pleased," he replied evenly before adding, "You okay?"

A nod, wild hair fell across her face. "Yes. Why?"

"You look like you just ran a marathon and you haven't caught your breath yet since you got here."

Well, you're not too far off on the marathon part. "Today was…interesting," she said instead, gulping down a couple more breaths of air. The stitch in her side was like an obnoxious toddler digging its tiny fingers between her ribs and her head was starting to spin. "One second," Katya held up a finger and did not even pay any mind to translating it from Russian to Japanese. Matsuoka frowned as his partner swung her legs around to dangle over the arm of the bench and lied down. "Okay," she mumbled to herself, letting her eyes fall shut as she tried to regain her composure.

Feeling strangely inspired, Katya took a page out of Matsuoka's book from their tutorial session that morning and repeated, "Do you have any questions?"

His voice was closer. It was difficult to accurately tell how much that was since the room was still spinning even though she was doing everything in her power to keep her lids closed. "You don't look too well," Matsuoka commented, tone bordering on accusatory in a 'why don't you take better care of yourself?' kind of way.

"Just–ugh!" Katya smacked her free palm against the wood, sending an unfortunate vibration through the bench and directly into her skull. "Ouch," she continued in Russian before managing to string out, "What do you need help with?"

Matsuoka sighed, his breath tickling against her cheeks with the faintest hint of cool peppermint. He's really close, Katya noted and painstakingly peeled her eyes back open. He was halfway out of a crouch when her eyes finally decided to cooperate and focus in on him, giving Katya a straight shot of his stomach. In the weeks they spent training together, Rin put on even more muscle than the exceptional definition he had to start. How much has he been working out?

"I've been thinking," his voice pulled her out of her musings and brought her attention back up to his face, "that I'm pretty sure I have all the components–" Katya must have pulled a grimace since he shook his head and slicked back his bangs with the rest of his hair. "I have all the parts, but I don't know if they're all working together properly."

"Like when you tried to fix your back?"

He nodded. "Yeah, like that."

At this point, Katya gave up on containing her barrage of sighs – she at least felt she deserved some slack with a few that slipped through given the day she had – and clumsily clopped over to the starting block next to Matsuoka's. "Will you show me a couple, please?"

Wordlessly, he mounted his block and snapped his goggles against his head. Even if he no longer felt the sting of the straps, Katya certainly did, especially with the raging headache she was still sporting. Matsuoka's starting position appeared correct thus far. Her main criticism was his shoulders were still a dash too tense for what they wanted to accomplish.

The slapping of water mingled with Rin's imperceptibly soft, hollow exhalation.

Katya shifted her focus to take in his whole body, hoping her headache would not impede her ability to capture every detail of his dive.

The trajectory was his best yet. Katya was certain beyond a shadow of a doubt he had been doing his foot exercises; it made her slightly queasy that she was jealous of his toe point. (It's not like you needed another thing to envy him for, her mind offered sardonically.) Impressively, his core stability was even better than when they last met.

But…his shoulders were still cutting off the line from his toes, across his back, and through his arms. If it were still early in their partnership, Katya was confident he would have completely brushed off her previous advice with keeping knot from forming between his shoulder blades. However, her most recent encounters with Matsuoka said otherwise; it was in his best interest to take her critiques to heart.

"You put heat on your back, right?" Katya posited, pinching the line between her brows. Pretty sure that sounded like real Japanese… She considered launching into the pool in hopes of getting rid of the piercing pain reverberating in her brain. Too bad the chlorination was not helping one bit.

Matsuoka hummed, "Mhmm. Why? Are my shoulders still shit?"

"Yes," the Russian deadpanned.

A low growl rumbled through his chest only for it to cut off barely a second later and be transplanted with a tired sigh. "You've gotta be kidding me," he bemoaned and tilted his head towards her just like that first night so many weeks ago. "Do you mind fixing them again?"

"Sure," the brunette whispered in Russian and shuffled over to his form, bare feet pattering in the remnant water from Samezuka's practice. Thankfully, the knots she grew accustomed to finding across the expanse of his back were significantly smaller than in the past. It would make it that much easier to get rid of them if he continued to follow his heat regimen. After pulling Matsuoka's shoulders so they settled further away from his ears, Katya assessed her handiwork. Satisfied, she resituated herself once more on her block and nodded. "Okay. Try again, please."

Matsuoka's energy was different. It was not necessarily confrontational, but rather… intense and stony. The lines of his face were rigid and unyielding. However, Katya could not comment on it since he had enough muscle control to not let it affect the rest of his body.

He inhaled deeply before taking the plunge. It's amazing what a little shoulder relaxation can do for the line of the dive, Katya approved with a slight smile.

Immediately after he resurfaced, Rin pushed his goggles up to his forehead and gasped, "Better?"

Katya nodded and bit on the tip of her index knuckle. But, it won't do him any good if he can't do it himself on the day of the race. Teaching him some of the tricks Nadya gave to her during her 'welcome to hell' introductory week to synchronized swimming was always a possibility. However, that set of exercises – a series of lateral stretching combined with massaging the tissue around the jugular and the junction of the neck and the collarbone – was much more effective over the passage of time; Katya truly got the hang of it only after four months. Neither she nor Matsuoka had that kind of time.

A sour line wriggled its way between her brows as the sole Zolnerovich daughter mulled over the best way of resolving this problem in the limited time frame they had remaining.

You could always Velcro weights around his wrists, an infuriating voice offered in a completely serious tone.

Katya responded sarcastically, Oh, yes, brain. Obviously one of your better ideas. Somehow, she highly doubted Matsuoka would appreciate a recommendation that insane.

"I have to do more research," she admitted, "but for the next week I think this will help." Katya gestured for Rin to follow her over to the bench and sit down. The redhead slung his SHARK towel around his neck and peered over at her inquisitively. "I want you to…sit like this during class." To demonstrate, Katya slid so the back of her knees hit the front of the seat and her back was board-straight. Pointing at the length of her neck, she expanded, "Remember to keep your neck long. As the day goes on, it will help with your shoulders."

Uncertainty filled his eyes. "Seriously?" he pulled a bemused face.

"Yes," Katya guaranteed in Russian. You hope, her subconscious tittered snarkily. What other options did they have? Honestly, she did not suspect that he would struggle with this portion the most, if at all. His struggles with his low back and stomach muscles, if anything, should have been the most aggravating to rectify. But, as she came to find, Matsuoka Rin was full of surprises when it came to swimming.

Nadya would lose her shit if she ever met him, Katya muffled her snort of amusement at the mental image of her former mentor parading her partner around the pool and showing off his muscles.

"What's so funny?" said redhead grumbled under his breath, curling forward to brace his elbows on his thighs.

"Nothing," she quickly reapplied her façade and smacked his back, leaving a bright, splotchy handprint in its place.

Rin barked, "Oi! What was that for?!"

"You need to start now," Katya shrugged absentmindedly.

His eyes said he seriously had words for her method of getting him sorted, but he reined it in and copied her sitting form. "Like this?"

Katya swiveled to face him and tucked her feet under her knees like a butterfly. "Keep your chin up," she corrected and nudged it with the tips of her fingers so Rin's jaw was parallel to his collarbone. "You can let it drop to take notes and read, but try to stay in this...uh…"

"Position?" he provided smoothly.

He was a lot better at filling in her blunders, too. "Yes. That one," she finished quietly.

Matsuoka settled into the shape she wanted, eyes forward and determined. After a couple minutes of Katya changing her vantage point to see that his posture was correct, his voice pulled her out of her analyses. "I didn't know you smoked," he said, face impassive save for the miniscule pinch of his nose. She definitely reeked of it.

"I do not," Katya quipped, pressing the heel of her hand into the base of Rin's spine, right above the band of his swimsuit to tilt his pelvis forward so the distribution of weight was more over the sits bones rather than his back. "My brother does." But, he just quit, she noted, still reeling from that whole experience. Never in her wildest dreams did Katya think that Kazimir would agree to such a condition.

Pain makes us do drastic things.

When she was satisfied with her handiwork, Katya returned to her spot on the bench, sat crisscrossed, and stretched with a flat back across her legs to dangle her hands towards the floor.

"Huh," Matsuoka uttered. Katya tilted her head sideways to get a half-glance at him. Was that…reassurance in his eyes? He realized she was watching him and cleared his throat before elaborating, "I was just confused who he was, that's all."

That…didn't clear up anything at all, but whatever, Katya grumbled internally and returned to her stretch. Her eyes began to slide shut and, in that moment, she knew she had to call it a night.

"I know you wanted to do another hour, but…" she faltered and cursed her brain for not having the wonderful gift of ease with foreign languages.

Matsuoka shook his head and grabbed her by the armpit to pull her up to sit like a normal person. "You look like you need to sleep."

"I am sorry," Katya finished meekly and pinched the bridge of her nose to alleviate the compounding pain in her frontal lobe.

And again, the idiot flicked her in the forehead. "Really?" she growled in exasperation.

Rin stated evenly, "Stop apologizing for things that aren't your fault." Perplexed, because she truly did not think she did it that much, Katya blinked up at him. He raised an eyebrow at her, challenging her to contradict him. With a slight tug of his lips, Matsuoka murmured, "You and Nitori should start a club."

He languidly pushed to a stand – a smoother transition from him than Katya thought him capable – and toweled off the excess water in his hair and the larger beads on his chest and shoulders. "Give me a minute to change and you can lock up."

Too tired to remember her Japanese, Katya nodded (or maybe stretched her neck from side to side, she honestly could not remember) and sluggishly slipped into her sandals.

A blink later and Matsuoka was back in front of her donned in sweatpants and a loose black tank top. "You need me to walk you back?"

Katya craned her neck to peer out the window. Fortunately, with the summer days getting longer, the final rays of sun still peeked over the horizon. She guessed she still had another twenty minutes to haul to her dorm before it set. Shaking her head, Katya reasoned, "There is still sun. I will be at my dorm before dark."

Finding no fault with her logic, Rin jutted his head towards the door. "See you tomorrow, then," he said and waved lackadaisically over his back, before leaving Katya alone in the aquatic center.

She was thankful for the silence the walk gave her after she locked up and came around the last corner of her marathon for the day.

---

Kazimir looked a little worse for wear when Katya picked him up from Umibe the following morning after her shift intending to take him for an early lunch and a whirl-wind tour of Old Iwatobi and the setup for the Squid Festival (always a popular event for the Ikagara students and alumni alike, for obvious reasons). While Katya was aware he would have some trouble sleeping from the time change and taking away his smokes, she did not anticipate finding him motionless in one of the front lobby chairs with enormous puffy bags under his eyes.

"What happened to you?" Katya snapped him out of his daze, resulting in a painful groan from her brother.

Kaz grumbled into the half of his mouth covered by his hand, "I don't really know. The food was great, but, oh man," he dragged his free hand down his face, "I don't think the sake she gave me is exactly store-bought."

Ah, her moonshine. That would do it. According the Fukui-san, the recipe was an old family secret that was meant to keep in-law events light should things turn sour. It was also strong enough to knock most people out by the smell alone – which nearly happened to Katya after one whiff – so it was miraculous her brother was still able to string together a sentence.

"How much did you drink?" She pinched the tense muscles between her brows and waited for the inevitable long day of nursing a hangover before shipping him back to Moscow that evening.

Kazimir squinted at her blearily and dragged his hands down his face. "Only a shot, I think."

Katya made the sign of the cross and mentally thanked God her brother was not still passed out, face-down in his cot. It was one thing to get the hangover out of his system; it was something else entirely different to revive him from a moonshine-induced coma. She glanced out of the corner of her eye at Fukui-san smiling serenely behind the concierge counter, feigning innocence.

"Okay," Katya grunted and helped her brother to his feet. "Let's get some food and water in you." So much for showing him the festival grounds.

The elder Zolnerovich nodded and with shaking hands produced his sunglasses from his jeans pockets and haphazardly shoved them on the bridge of his nose. Katya quickly thanked her employer as she ushered her brother out the door – over his moans that her voice was too bright and the sun was too loud – to a local food stall by the beach Shizuku showed her during her first week in Iwatobi.

The moment Kazimir smelled the wafting scent of deep-fried chicken and fresh lettuce, he stopped in his tracks and blathered, "I think I'm gonna be sick," before attempting to become acquainted with the nearest tree trunk.

Katya tugged him back on the path by a belt loop and clicked her tongue in admonishment, "Come on. Vomiting won't make you feel any better. Just wait a couple more minutes."

Once they reached the stall, Katya forced Kazimir to sit still at a picnic bench before she ordered the largest water the vendor offered and two servings of the wonder that was karaage. Katya peeked over her shoulder as she waited for the food to finish frying at her brother. He appeared to be deep in thought – over what, Katya had no clue. She had to snigger behind a hand as he reverted back to a habit she recognized from when she was four where he would suck his lower lip between his teeth and try to 'whistle' around the gaps. (More often than not, it sounded like a sputtering faucet and their mother reprimanded him every time he inadvertently did it at the dinner table.)

After their meals were ready, Katya grabbed the liter water bottle and dropped it in front of Kaz with a heavy clang. She stuck her tongue out childishly when he sent her a withering glare, but promptly opened the bottle, dropped in the extra-long straw she grabbed as an afterthought, and slowly, greedily gulped it down. Katya returned a minute later with their karaage wrapped in lettuce and foil with a large heap of paper napkins.

"Have at it," Katya suggested before she dug straight into hers. Normally, Etsuko did not approve of the team eating anything that included the word 'fried.' But, this was a once in a blue moon occurrence and it was a given that she was going to burn off the calories easily that evening during practice. Choosing to savor the flavors, Katya dug in.

"You have a competition coming up soon, don't you?" Kazimir asked after he came up for air, his bottle of water half empty.

"Yep. Next weekend," she affirmed stiffly, pondering in the back of her mind where he was going with the conversation.

Nowhere, probably, a bitter and sardonic part of her brain (the same part that dug up every olfactory memory that seeped from his room right after his accident) supplied. Sadly, Katya knew she could not come up with a counter.

Instead, Kaz simply nodded and said tersely, "Nice…good luck."

She did not even bother acknowledging his statement and felt slightly irked when she noticed him mentally chewing something over rather than the food in front of him.

Kaz did not touch a bite of his karaage in two minutes before Katya kicked him lightly in the shin under the picnic table, though thankfully the drink helped dissipating the effects of the hangover as a sharpness returned to his movements in general. "You need to eat it fast. It tastes awful cold," she garbled around her bite of chicken and lettuce.

"You like him," Kazimir said in realization, palms smacking against the table for emphasis.

She raised an eyebrow at him. "Who?"

"Weird-teeth guy." To demonstrate his point Kaz pushed aside his upper lip to bare his canine.

"Matsuoka?" He nodded slowly, as if she was struggling to get the punchline. Katya shrugged and finished the mouthful. "Yeah, I guess. He's a pretty good tutor. My English grade's gone up–"

Her brother dropping his forehead against the table with a drawn out groan interrupted her train of thought. That must run in the family, Katya glanced down at him, baffled. "You're hopeless!" he cried as he threw his head back.

A young boy in the park slid down the slide and shouted while pointing at the two obvious foreigners, "Look, Mama! That man's howling at the sun!"

Katya grit through her teeth, "Kaz, you're attracting way too much attention," and yanked him by the front of his shirt collar to sit properly. "…and I'm not hopeless," she grumbled and resisted the urge to pout into her karaage.

"I know you know more than me about a lot of things, but trust me when I say you're hopeless about this," Kazimir countered and dug into his meal. He hummed appreciatively, "This is pretty good. Not as heavy as I was expecting."

Nodding absentmindedly and watching the children continue to race to see who could get to the slide the fastest, Katya inquired, "What exactly am I hopeless about?"

"Matsuoka."

"What about him?"

"You like him." He made a point of saying the final part around the straw of his soft drink, "I mean in a romantic way."

What kind of reaction did he expect? All Katya mustered was a slight twitching motion with her neck and a tightness around her jaw. She did not know for how long she held still, but, at a certain point, she nearly dropper her karaage from the shock which would not do at all.

Kazimir snapped his fingers right in front of her and hissed like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar, lips pulled back in a forced smile. "Did I break you?"

Katya broke out of her stupor and scoffed, "Where and how did you get that idea?"

Unperturbed, he stated with assurance, "Just by watching. You should have seen your face when you two talked outside the pool yesterday and when you thought you were going to be late meeting him."

"You haven't been here twenty four hours; you haven't had the time to just watch."

Far from deterred – with infuriating warmth of smugness glowing in his irises, more saturated blue – Kazimir tapped her nose, a feather like touch Katya barely felt, and left her with one last piece of commentary, "Sometimes it's easier to see the pieces fit together when you're not stuck in the middle of it. Trust me on that." And he punctuated the end of his spiel by stuffing the rest of his karaage into his mouth.

Katya could not contain the juvenile scowl that twisted across her lips. What did this have to do with anything? Kazimir laughed heartily (warmer and more exuberant that she recalled in the past few years) and managed between guffaws, "That's the same face Nikolai keeps making whenever Mama says he can't have a snack before dinner."

Shaking her head in amused recollection, Katya sniggered tartly, "Well, he did learn it watching both of us growing up, so we do take some of the blame. And what Nikolai considers a snack is a dentist's nightmare."

"True." An awkward, but thankfully not stifling, silence hung between them. Kaz took a loud sip of his nearly empty drink and quipped, "Don't think you've managed to make me forget about your little crush."

Tightening her grip on the piece of balled-up foil in her hand, Katya hissed icily, frigidly, "There's nothing to forget. There's nothing there for you to see."

She had not meant for her last statement to be as passive-aggressive as it sounded. It didn't just sound like that, her subconscious corrected. It was. She unintentionally tried to push him out of her life again.

The color faded out of his irises again and Kazimir twirled tufts of hair from his temple around his middle finger, averting his gaze to a murder of crows noisily chasing away a flock of pigeons from scattered pieces of bread an old woman scattered a few minutes earlier. The kids did not seem as loud anymore. "Right," he agreed and with fluidity that time could never rip away from him grabbed Katya's trash, spun around in his seat, and threw them in the garbage. He shoved his hands in his jean pockets, despite the heat of mid-summer. "We should probably head back, so I'm not late for the boat. Wouldn't want to make you pay for another night."

Katya cleared her throat and nodded probably a little too eagerly. She trotted to catch up to him and lead him back to Umibe.

All things considered, his visit was not as disastrous as her gut led her to believe when she caught sight of him during practice yesterday. There were still too many words left unsaid and fresh wounds for their relationship to be considered anything but rocky, but Katya liked to think (and she was positive Kazimir would concur) it was a step in the right direction, a step towards healing.

"On the off chance that I'm right about you and what's-his-face," Kaz mentioned in a sing-song voice, arching his back lazily and ignoring Katya's half-assed death glare, "if he ever hurts you, don't hesitate to call. I'll be back here before you know it."

She could not help it. The slant to her brows softened and she muttered to the wind, "Thanks."

After several minutes of less-than-desirable silence, Katya asked, "You'll let me know when you get back to Moscow, right?"

Kazimir smiled down at her. "Of course."

Katya waited for the idea of possibly being involved with Rin in another light beyond their current arrangement to make her queasy. It did not come when she helped Kaz pack up his limited items from the trip; it did not come when they said goodbye (with a rare hug shared between them) at the pier that took him from Iwatobi to China where he would board the express back to Moscow; it did not come even when she and Matsuoka trained again that evening – between her making corrections to his shoulders and him swimming in his thoughts – as they held their breaths for the prefectural tournament.

That evening after Katya forcefully added the last period to her English homework, she crawled into bed, stared mutely at the bottom of Shizuku's bunk, and let the clickity clack of her roommate proofing an article for the enormous summer issue lull her to sleep. The last thought she had as her eyes drooped shut around the memory of the first bold, eager grin she saw from Rin was, Well…this isn't good.

---

Rin was afraid the wave of nausea from the room spinning and fading into the familiar setting of the old Iwatobi Swim Club would get ahead of him and actually throw up. In front of him a dark figure stood facing the water, the gleam of a golden dolphin trophy momentarily blinding the second-year. "Dad?" Rin choked out, hand extending towards the beaming figure of his father – a child, wondrous of the world and ecstatic.

His father never appeared in his dreams as an adult. He always looked exactly as he did in the group photo of him and his relay team from Iwatobi Swim Club – choppy, wild brown hair swishing with the wind, red eyes bright with hope for the future, smile wide and blinding. It was something Rin could never emulate, never return to. (Gou once said that he and their father looked like carbon copies of each other at the same age, even down to the grin. Their mother never said anything about possible resemblances after his passing.)

The boyhood version of Toraichi darted off in a sprint. Rin bolted after him, wheezing (Why do you feel like you're drowning, swimming in circles?), "Dad, wait!" The boy continued to run, long legs for his age carrying him like a gazelle, through the streets of Iwatobi and disappearing into the tunnel overlooking the southern end of the beach.

And in a flash Rin was back among the throngs of faceless people carrying candles at his father's funeral. He elbowed his way through the crowd, desperately trying to not be swept away by the procession and get away from the stifling smell of incense.

(Or are you the one being circled?)

A desperate gulp for air broke through his lungs as Rin reached the end of the line. Out of his peripheral vision, he noticed the two small shadows of himself and Gou acting as the anchors for the cacophony of treading footsteps; the two dots of maroon alone in a sea of eerie green and grey, their mother nowhere to be seen.

Unlike every other permutation of this nightmare Rin's brain somehow conjured every evening, his ten-year-old self twisted around just enough that he had to release his tight grip of Gou's tiny hand and unblinkingly looked him dead in the eyes.

Rin's breath hitched at the words that spilled out of the child's mouth. Though it was distorted by the rocking back and forth of the dream, the message was unmistakable. "It's all your fault…"

He awoke with enough sweat soaking his lightweight clothing to fill Samezuka's pool. This is getting out of hand, a voice in his head reiterated for the fourth time that week.

It'll be fine once I beat Haru, Rin repeated to complete the same circuit that had been running on loop for days on end. It'll all go away. Although at this point, even he had a hard time believing his own reassurances.

His body was a series of oxymorons. The gooseflesh across his arms and legs – despite his sweatpants and tank top – did not sit well with him against the scalding heat building in his skull. The pounding was beyond disorienting; no matter how much he tried, his eyes would not listen to his brain and focus.

Rin raked a hand through his tangled hair, wincing as his fingers snagged on a couple of knots and grimacing at how clammy his roots were since he accidentally fell asleep an hour earlier. Nitori silently – or maybe he was just too stunned to hear his kouhai – clambered down from the top bunk and prodded, "Are you all right, Matsuoka-senpai?" His voice was quiet. No, quieter, meeker than normal. It was astounding Rin actually heard it.

Nitori's figure was fuzzy at best, his outline swaying to and fro through the redhead's vision. "Yeah, I'm fine," he said with as much false confidence that his voice was capable through the fogginess of his brain.

"A-Are you sure?" the first-year stuttered. "You were talking in your sleep. It sounded like you were crying."

Waving off his kouhai's concern and swallowing his own panic at someone glimpsing behind the iron curtain he built over the years, Rin rolled down against his pillow and huffed, "Don't worry about it."

"Okay, senpai," Nitori acknowledged with a slight nod. "Let me know if you need anything," he left out in the open before returning his cluttered desk to refresh his memory for an upcoming test.

Rin wanted, needed to breathe, to reset the air in his lungs, but the risk of setting his roommate's anxious tendencies off was enough for him to take his time and excruciatingly exhale and inhale through his nose. A few minutes later, he stalked over to his desk and slipped into the shape Katya demonstrated to him, eyes lazily skimming over his notes from the day. He cut through the thick silence of the room, "Nitori. I've already informed the captain of this, but don't be surprised that I won't be on the bus to the tournament tomorrow."

The grey-haired first-year frowned at the open-ended excuse. "Why, senpai?"

'Why' was such a sticky question. Rin did not truly care for it when people brushed around the raw topics of his life. Katya unintentionally did it a week earlier about Haru, Makoto, and Nagisa. Unfortunately, Nitori was about to step on an even larger land mine. Doing his best to leave it as vague as possible, Rin replied with practiced evenness, "I'm going to see my dad."

He was not quite sure what happened, because he did not think he said anything out of the ordinary, but Nitori sprung from the clutter of his desk over to Rin and gripped his shoulders with more zeal than the redhead expected. Grey eyes tried to search his soul and he simultaneously avoided the deep gaze. "Please don't die, Matsuoka-senpai!"

Something in his brain tried to reset and failed. Rin drew a blanked, but still uttered out, "Huh?" When he made the mistake of meeting Nitori's gaze again, his kouhai's eyes were watering with enough unshed tears to solve the summer drought problems. "I'm not going to die!" he insisted and twisted his arms to put some distance between them. Rin puffed his bangs out of his face and explained, calmer, "I have some things I need to do. Don't worry about it."

Nitori was still jittery and he tugged lightly on the skin around his elbows, but he accepted, "Okay, senpai," and dragged his feet back to his desk, head drooping over his work but not really paying attention to it.

Rin swallowed any other words he might have had for the night and mechanically dove into his own pile of paper, all the while envisioning a solid gold number one flashing next to his name in his race against Haru.

---

His warm-up suit did nothing to prevent a chill from running through his core each time the warm, humid summer wind beat against his father's grave marker and straight into his face. The heavy kanji etched into the thick stone looked as rushed as the day he, Gou, and their mother laid the young father to rest. The plinth was exactly as his parents designed it (even though it was made far earlier than either of them could have anticipated): robust enough to stand the wear and tear of time, wind, and rain.

But where was that kind of stability there for them now?

The guilt festered in his heart like carelessly sown seed. It was not always that way. It began as disappointment – that his dad did not achieve, let alone go after his dream. Then, one day while Rin was abroad (after quite a nasty scuffle with a classmate who decided his Engrish was not good enough) the seed grew into responsibility. Maybe, had he not been around, Gou might have had a father in her life instead of being a part of the funeral processional, gripping onto her brother's shirttail like a lifeline. (Who needed to be a fisherman when one could be an Olympic swimmer?) Finally, that sapling sprouted into guilt and the vines of ice cracked and crushed his too idealistic and fragile heart.

The wind slapped his cheeks again and sent stray strands of hair dancing around his eyes before a strong gust pushed it all floating behind his head.

Rin tentatively held out a clenched fist to the stone, waiting for it to respond, to meet his solemn promise, "I'm going to win, Dad." He blinked back tears (from wind burn, of course) as the slab of rock did not return his fist-bump like Matsuoka Toraichi did an eternity ago. Resigning to come back and try another day, the redhead tilted his wrist just enough to tap his knuckles lightly against the rough surface.

He was alone again.

Even the wind no longer wished to be around him.

---

Although his teammates bustled through the locker room with a dull, chaotic hum, Rin was surprisingly calm. He sat on the long bench bisecting the space between the rows of lockers and listed through everything he and Zolno practiced over the past few weeks, checking off each skill set under his breath. Rin closed his eyes, blocking out the other extraneous information running through the back of his mind, and began.

Despite already doing several reps of foot exercises that morning before he slunk out to visit his dad's grave, Rin visualized rolling through his heels to his arches, exploding with energy built in his toes, and plunging into the water. The muscles surrounding his lumbar vertebrae were flexible while he engaged and disengaged the low stomach muscles to provide the support needed for the optimum curve of his dive. (He went through too much of Zolno forcing him into awkward positions for him to not get this right.) Lastly, all that was left for Rin was to keep his posture square and straight and let gravity pull his shoulders down.

Admittedly, he was not completely confident in this exercise, but from Katya's murmuring on the subject he figured there were not a lot of options left.

As he relaxed into this position, Rin let his mind wander, recalling several tense encounters at the check-in counters in the lobby. Schools from across the prefecture mixed and divided in a kaleidoscope of colors from their uniforms. Samezuka was easy to spot with its stark geometric patterns and where they went, Ikagara was not far behind. However, too concerned with locating a short Russian in a sea of classmates, Rin failed to notice four white and blue jackets clustered in the center of the blob.

He truly wanted to backpedal out of there, unwilling to face his former teammates without a plan in mind, but watched helplessly as the gap behind him filled with students from other schools. Before he made a break for it for the locker rooms, the guttural sounds he recognized as Russian filled his ears. Rin followed the voice and rolled his eyes at what he found.

It was annoying watching 'Glasses Kid' – his replacement – chatter enthusiastically with Katya, particularly since his Russian actually seemed to be understandable. Meanwhile, Rin could barely stumble over 'hello my name is' without sounding like a complete idiot. One evening Nitori revealed he had the unlikely hearing of a bat (which was entirely ironic since he could probably sleep through the apocalypse) when he innocently asked, "What's that, senpai?" to his roommate barely breathing through the pronunciation guide for introductory phrases. Since after, the redhead stuck to repeating words over and over on his morning runs to avoid any possibility of being caught saying them wrong.

Katya and the one he miraculously recalled she dubbed 'Rei' broke into chortles and obnoxious laughter, the latter pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose after a particularly violent snort. Whatever it was, Rin had no doubt it was absolutely hysterical if only he could actually grasp Russian colloquialisms.

He mildly wondered if this was what Zolno experienced on a daily basis: watching and not understanding.

A clap on his shoulder startled Rin and his thoughts away from the two not a meter away from him. He tilted his head sidewise to find Hamasaki sending him an intense, fired-up stare – a worrisome thing to come face-to-face, to say the least. With a knowing smirk, the Ikagara synchro captain patted him a couple more times and left him with a serious, "Good luck," before stalking off with a smooth wave, probably to discuss something with Mikoshiba.

Meanwhile, Katya animatedly described something with the full use of her hands.

Before his brain caught up and belated sent out a warning signal that he was about to tread into dangerous territory, Rin was already adjacent to Katya and the Iwatobi first-year. He did not need to look at the bespectacled Rei to know he was affronted at his sudden presence, bringing the conversation to an end. Katya, on the other hand, nodded at him and hummed with a hint of surprise, "Ah, you are here, Matsuoka."

"Yeah."

The Rei kid spluttered something easily in Russian to Katya before he bowed out and found the other members of his club. She spouted a response and waved as he disappeared into the crowd. A second later her entire attention zoomed in on Rin. (He refused to gulp at her scrutiny.)

"Are you ready?" she prompted, eyes swiftly glossing over his posture even through the bagginess of his Samezuka warmup suit.

Rin clicked his tongue to cover up a hiss as she pressed her thumb between his shoulder blades, "Sure."

Were it any other person, Rin might have considered the silence to follow as disappointment, an expectation of failure. But, with Katya – if spending every single day since the synchronized swimming team crash landed in his school's pool training for this moment was any indication – it was more an acknowledgement that there really was nothing more either of them could do to prepare.

She circled him a couple times, scanning his form up and down. An eternity later, she stopped directly in front of him and tilted her chin up to stare in his eyes. Her size was still comical, but Rin supposed he was almost accustomed to it at this point. After all, it was difficult to make fun of her stature when he was too busy preventing himself from spiraling into a whirlpool of emerald. She opened her mouth to give one last piece of advice, but his voice beat her to the punch.

"I have to head to the locker room," he said evenly and shifted to slip through the cracks between the people, but faltered and, against his better judgement, met her gaze again. "Samezuka has gatherings after the competitions at our pool to kind of celebrate," Rin explained, gulping over the sandpaper in his throat. "You should come."

Katya stretched her neck back and forth, eyes falling closed (I'm safe for a couple seconds! a panicked voice in the back of his mind shouted in relief). Suddenly, the intensity was back as she nodded and agreed in Russian, "Yes."

Rin lifted a hand to twist the wispy hair at the base of his head between an index finger and a thumb before he weaved through the crowd with duffel in tow to prepare himself to face Haru.

Forty minutes later, he shoved his hair under his swim cap and filed into line with the other swimmers in his heat, satisfied that he was ready – ready to face the water.

And, this time, he was not going to bend to its will.

---

"How on Earth do you survive this weather? I'm going to melt," Katya moaned while attempting to curl further under the parasol Shizuku lent her. "…and the humidity isn't helping either." She mentally chastised herself for not savoring the air conditioning on the bus longer. It was going to be a long, muggy day without it.

"Wow, Katya," her roommate cooed and snapped a photo without even bothering to look through the viewfinder. "I didn't think it was possible, but your face is even brighter red than Shark boy's hair."

"Woohoo," the Russian deadpanned with even less enthusiasm than before.

Mikoshiba leaned forward around Hamasaki to get a better look at his former dance partner. "Is she going to be okay?" he asked, voice spiking with concern.

Etsuko dangled a dry rag in front of her out-of-her-element kouhai who limply pulled it under the sliver of shade left under her umbrella and dabbed at the sweat beading off her temples. "She'll be fine if she gets back inside after Matsuoka's heat. Don't want her passing out or anything."

Katya released a poorly timed groan. "If I die," she prattled in Russian, "Matsuoka gets my English notes to burn, Shizuku becomes the executor of the estate of our dorm to do as she sees fit, and I leave Etsuko all of my unused hair product."

"…what?" Mikoshiba croaked.

"She's a little melodramatic when it comes to hot weather," Shizuku explained calmly. She was not quite as composed the summer of their first year when Katya spent most of her time in the dorm clad in only a pair of shorts and a tank-top and slept on the floor with just a pillow (over the newspaper editor's shrieking and profane objections). But, once she figured out how to deal with her roommate's eccentricities when it came to temperature, the two went through their days like normal with the occasional exception of Shizuku reminding Katya that tank tops and shorts were not going to cut it for the school board as 'proper attire.' "Don't worry about it," she tacked on as a last and completely useless assurance.

"Oh!" the brunette exclaimed as if she suddenly remembered a vital detail. "Akiyama retains the rights to use my phone contacts for whatever she wants."

Minami stage-whispered to his green-haired partner in crime behind the row of senpai, "I don't think I want to know what she said, especially if it involves that bloodhound."

Shizuku gasped elatedly, "How did you know that's what we called her?!"

"EH?!"

Shizuku stated matter-of-factly, "The newspaper editors joke that she somehow manages to sniff out the best stories – like a bloodhound." Uozumi and Minami sighed as if to say 'That doesn't make us feel any better.'

"I wanna know," Katya slurred, oblivious to the continuous screeching of the first-year duo in the row behind her, "how and where she gets all of her information…" She uncapped her third bottle of water in that afternoon and began to slowly and continuously drink everything.

Mikoshiba waved a hand in front of her face. When the flyer did not visually respond to his cue, he flicked his gaze over to Etsuko. "Does she even know how to speak Japanese anymore?"

"Probably not," she hummed with a shrug. "Katya?" Etsuko attempted in what little Russian she knew and shook her kouhai's shoulder. "Do you need to go inside?"

"I don't know," she gurgled around a mouthful of water before chugging down the rest of the bottle.

"Just out of curiosity," Mikoshiba chimed in, "Matsuoka was muttering about her English test for this week. How did that go?"

"Eighty-seven percent," Katya whooped.

Mikoshiba, Etsuko, and Shizuku (who even got to see Katya's returned exam a couple days earlier, but was probably still not over it) exclaimed, "EH?!"

Etsuko was the first to recover, grumbling confrontationally, "Where was he when I needed to be tutored last year?"

Mikoshiba nodded sagely with no doubt stories of his own to add fuel to the fire with regards to the woes of the English language and threw in his two cents, "I knew Matsuoka was the best for English, but I didn't think it was by this much."

Shizuku plopped back into her seat on the bleachers, dramatically using her hand as a pathetic shield against the judging stares of the other schools. "I was pretty good at it last year, but now he's taken my place as her tutor. The horror!" She slumped against Katya in a feigned faint. While the Samezuka students crowded around her to verify she was actually all right, everyone from Ikagara watched the final heat for the 1600 meter breast stroke wind down with equally bored, deadpanned expressions.

This was nothing new for anyone who knew Takenaka Shizuku.

Shizuku sat up properly and harrumphed. "You guys are no fun." Were she not already taking photos for her articles, she would have cross her arms and sighed dejectedly to no end. However, newspaper duties came first and she was not about to ruin any of her chances of possibly bumping up a tier in the editor hierarchy next year. If her roommate was on the balcony taking aerial shots, Katya had no doubt that the ninja-like Akiyama Akira had a much better vantage point for close-ups (most likely from a series of bushes).

Over the loudspeaker, the announcer droned on monotonously, "We will now begin the third heat of the one hundred meter freestyle."

Against her will – not that she truly had any in her overheated state – Katya hobbled over to the balcony railing, leaned over it at the waist, and honed in on the starting blocks. Oh jeez, she hoped as Matsuoka fit in a couple last minute stretches, please let him remember to drop his shoulders…and keep his back stable…and point his toes. Please just remember everything I taught you, Sharky!

"Well," Mikoshiba appeared out of the corner of her eye and raised an eyebrow in mild interest, "let's see how both your efforts turned out."

Translation, the snide and yet simultaneously anxious side of her brain chattered, no pressure.

Nitori added in a cautiously optimistic tone, "I wish you and Matsuoka-senpai luck, Katya-senpai!"

Katya smiled softly at the first-year and silently hoped his wish came to pass.

She squinted down at the starting blocks and almost swore that Nanase was in the lane adjacent to Matsuoka, but she did not put it past the weather to mess with her vision. Was it just her imagination or did everyone else also see the squiggly lines of heat rising off the pool water? That did not seem normal in the slightest.

The moderator bellowed the order for the swimmers to mount their blocks followed closely by the subsequent one to fall into a lunge. Katya bit down lightly on the tip of her tongue and watching with bated breath Matsuoka slip into that all-familiar position on starting block number four. Even in her delirious state she could tell his energy completely changed: it coiled in on itself like a spring, lying in wait at its highest potential until it converted into everything he needed to propel off that platform*.

The shrill beep pierced through the air and the swimmers launched through the air like arrows. Matsuoka's dive was smoother than ever – a finessed curve from his toes (fully pointed, to boot) extending to the top of his head and his stomach contracted to hold everything together. And in the ultimate sense of 'last minute,' Matsuoka managed to keep his shoulders relaxed. He hit the water about half a meter ahead of Nanase. Had Katya not been so entranced by Matsuoka pulling ahead of his rival, she would have vocalized the stream of consciousness in the back of her mind somewhere between a snarky 'So he can actually do it' and 'OH MY GOSH HE DID IT!'

Meanwhile, Matsuoka steadily increased his lead to two body lengths by the time he flipped over for the turn. Mikoshiba vibrated with anticipation next to her as his teammates chanted, "And swim! Swim! Swim! Swim!" Katya could not truly understand what Etsuko and Shizuku were saying in support (since both of them tended to drop syllables of words when they got excessively passionate or excited about something), but it was enough to rally the rest of the Ikagara students to jump to their feet and hurl everything from cheers of encouragement to threats of cut goggle bands at the redhead.

With less than thirty meters to go, Nanase, due to his slimmer stature than Rin's, began to gain speed at an alarming rate. She guessed Matsuoka did not call him 'Haru the Magnificent' for nothing. Katya felt her lip curl and huffed. In the orotund voice that her native language was more prone to carry than Japanese (not that she really knew the wording for what she wanted to say, anyway), she hollered, "I did not spend weeks helping you with this just so you could lose, idiot! Go faster, Matsuoka!"

Mikoshiba chuckled beside her and chimed in, "What she said!"

It was a shame Shizuku did not have the funds for overhead video of the lanes because this heat was going to be a photo finish. If there was ever a time Akiyama's talents were needed, this was it.

Twenty meters left…

Did a stone drop in her stomach? The advantage Matsuoka created in the first leg dwindled down to a measly half a length. Katya stretched her neck from side to side. The windmill motion of Rin's arms sped up a fraction more, but Nanase returned in kind. Emerald eyes scanned the distance left and she hissed through her teeth, doubt about her partner's chances of success expanding beyond just a nagging sensation in the back of her skull.

She counted down the few meters left in the race when the desperate shout of a familiar voice pulled Katya out of her trance with the swimming battle below. "Haruka-senpai!" Ryugazaki Rei, a young man she knew from her few meetings with him tried his best to appear composed and level-headed, screeched.

Katya barely had the chance to question the befuddlement before the combined efforts of Shizuku, Etsuko, and Nitori crying, "C'MON(, senpai)!" snapped her back to reality.

Matsuoka and Nanase were stretched as far as their bodies would allow towards the sensor plates beneath their starting blocks, fingertips extended greedily to grasp victory. To a layman, the Ikagara students included, it looked like both swimmers touched at the same time. Hell, even Mikoshiba seemed unconfident of who actually won the heat, fiery eyebrows furrowed.

Katya reverted back to habit and continued to tilt her head back and forth, allowing the tendons in her neck to contract and relax while her jaw clamped like a vice in trepidation. If he lost, her reputation and reliability from her fingers in many pies was sunk.

All three teams froze as they waited for the neon yellow 'one' to flash next to their preferred swimmer's name.

A collective gasp broke through the crowd on the Samezuka-Ikagara side.

Lane 4 – 1 – Matsuoka Rin

Etsuko and Shizuku were, shockingly, the first to react. "HELL YES!" they boomed followed closely by Mikoshiba and the Samezuka brigade breaking into a prescribed chant.

"Way to go, Matsuoka!"

Katya raised her arms above her head, parasol swaying awkwardly in a rare refreshing breeze, and cried, "YES!"

"SENPAI!" Nitori yelled with a blinding and sincere smile stretched across his face. Katya could not help but join him in that sentiment.

Matsuoka ripped his cap and goggles from his head in one fell swoop and erupted from his spot with a deafening roar of joy. Even through the wall of water he created by throwing his hands in the air, Katya still made out his broad beam at all his work, all his effort finally paying off.

A long-held raspberry escaped her lips and Mikoshiba chuckled next to her, "Whatever you did, you have my highest respect." To further demonstrate he offered two thumbs up and a congratulatory nod.

Katya shook her head – still shocked from the whole event – and returned, "Thank you. It means a lot to me. But," she glanced down at Matsuoka, who was suddenly out on dry land again with a lazy hand on hip, his other dangling his Samezuka jacket and saying something to Nanase, "Matsuoka does have some of the…credit?"

Mikoshiba blinked at her (people seemed to be doing that to her a lot recently, but Katya could not wrap her head around why) before nodding towards the stairs. "Yeah. That's the word. You should probably head inside," he suggested and traced sloppy circles around his cheeks. "Your face is turning really red."

Katya fumbled around her cheeks with the back of her hand and verified that, of course, they were warm. Spluttering her thanks, she tugged the parasol closed, grabbed her hipster, and made a beeline for the shade. She smirked at the fading chatting of the people she grew to know over her past two years in Japan from Shizuku and Etsuko still applauding Matsuoka's victory to Mikoshiba comforting Nitori over his disappointment at not getting the opportunity to congratulate Katya on her victory as well to Uozumi and Minami vowing to advance to the next round in their respective strokes.

Once she staggered inside, Katya slumped against the nearest wall and released a breath she did not know she was holding. The satisfaction of her training with Matsuoka paying off swept over her like a riptide – not quite enough to make her drown, but enough for her chest to contract at the overwhelming nature of the sensation. To be honest, close to the end of the heat she was not entirely sure that Matsuoka managed to touch the sensor before his rival, but he did not need to know that. Regardless, his dive was closer to flawless than even she ever imagined. Hell, it even put Nanase's starting dive to shame, which was no easy feat.

Dabbing at the sweat beading on her forehead, the flyer set out further into the building to find her partner and congratulate him on a well-deserved victory. She pondered whether or not to discuss other exercises and stretches for him to use to keep his muscles memory fresh in this time between the prefectural and regional tournaments. Additionally, it was to his benefit if Katya could come up with a better method for shoulder relaxation because simply letting gravity do the work was not a long-term fix.

A cluster of scratchy voices around the corner leading into another corridor tugged her away from her thoughts.

"What? Was it so difficult for Haru to grasp that he could actually lose to me?" a voice she recognized as Rin's simpered. Katya's feet crawled to a halt. That was…strange. She never heard Matsuoka use this tone of voice before. Still confused by the subject of conversation, Katya flattened herself against the wall – the surface clammy against her overheated skin – and expended her entire focus translating. "After all, he said he didn't care about his time or winning."

She was even more baffled when Ryugazaki's voice (since she did not think he and Matsuoka were acquainted at all) muttered in response, "So he's not upset about losing…" Katya frowned. Obviously she was missing something from this picture.

"Huh?" Matsuoka barked, scathing and harsh like sandpaper. "What else matters in swimming beyond winning?!"

"Don't you remember?" a third voice inquired monotonously. Katya's memory was not the best, but was that not Tachibana Makoto? His tone was much colder and blander than she remembered – a far cry from the warm and calming sound from when she ran into the Iwatobi team at Sports Zero. "Wasn't it you who showed Haru in our elementary school relay that winning was only a part of swim–?"

"Who cares?!" Matsuoka snapped, the cracking of his teeth against each other practically echoing down the hall. Katya peered down at her free hand to find it curled in a fist, her nails digging painfully into the pad of her palm. She forced it to release and clicked her tongue at the four perfect crescent-shaped indentations in her skin, splotchy and stiff. "That doesn't matter anymore," the redhead concluded in a dead tone before his footsteps grew louder. Katya felt her heart drop in her stomach and pushed herself further into the wall, praying that she would melt into it or, even better, Matsuoka would be too distracted and continue on his way without noticing her listening in on his conversation. By some weird twist of fate, it worked. Rin swaggered down the corridor back towards the pool while the remaining voices murmured some more.

Katya tuned out the world and retraced her steps to regroup with her teammates. A foreign feeling bubbled in the pit of her belly. It was neither nausea nor hunger, but something equally ugly with a mind of its own. All that triumphant elation she felt just minutes earlier dissipated as fleetingly as grain blown away by an autumn wind.

Before she could properly applaud Matsuoka, she had to figure out why she wanted to curl up in a corner and why his tone was a slap in her face.

She reemerged at the top of the balcony steps but stayed to the shadows, mulling over the awkward turmoil building in her body. (She still cracked a grin when Mikoshiba set a record for his freestyle race with no competition whatsoever. As expected of the captain of Samezuka…)

The heat of the summer afternoon was nothing compared to the boiling in her gut when Katya finally discovered her answer.

---

He won.

He wanted to shout it from the bottom of the oceans, the edge of the docks, the top of the hill where his family's grave marker laid, even the heavens. He won. Matsuoka Rin finally beat Nanase Haruka and, shit, did it feel fantastic.

Samezuka kicked ass at the prefectural tournament. Mikoshiba set a new record and Uozumi qualified for regionals as well in backstroke. Although Minami did not qualify for individual butterfly, he was still going to regionals on the relay team for the 1600 meter medley. Unfortunately, Nitori was only a fraction of a second off from qualifying for the next tournament. As for Rin, he could not even think about regionals because he was so elated. Everything he lost back in Australia was redeemed. Nanase Haruka was the best swimmer he knew, the one that the coaches and parents called a prodigy when he, Haru, Makoto, and Nagisa were still at the local swim club.

But not anymore…

Mikoshiba ordered the team to file into the aquatic center and have small refreshments as congratulations to those who qualified.

Rin exhaled and let the whole ordeal finish sinking in. But, he decided that he could not bask in the glory all by himself. Were it not for Mikoshiba forcing him to agree to help, were it not for Zolno…he might not have made it. Swallowing his pride, Rin searched for the short Russian, but found his efforts futile amongst his classmates who on average stood at least ten centimeters taller than her. Though he wanted to move away from the semicircle of teammates that formed around him – clapping him on the shoulders and back while offering words of celebration – as he stood in between starting blocks, the pool at his back, he convinced himself that he would, at latest, see her the following afternoon for tutoring.

"Matsuoka." He turned to his left to find Mikoshiba raising his clear, plastic cup of sports drink in his direction and sending him an impressed nod. Rin felt it only fitting to mimic Seijuurou's effort, since his captain did set a record. Maybe one day I'll get my turn.

Glancing across the pool, Rin checked the time and figured he should find Zolno and thank her (because he was really struggling to hold back his smile) before curfew. He set his own drink down on the starting block to his right, pulled his phone out of a back pocket and texted her asking her where she was. After sliding the screen shut and placing it next to his cup, Rin dropped onto the block and waited for a response. Despite the general chatter of people around him, Rin still made out the distinct chime of Zolno's phone whenever she received a message. Ah, so she's already here. He shot straight up and craned his neck around the gaggles of his teammates, searching for any sight of long brown hair.

The heavy thumping of running footsteps across the linoleum floor around the pool seemed to break through the murmur of the crowd. "Dvigaite*!" a low, but definitely feminine voice bellowed.

Everything after that seemed to happen in slow motion. His own teammates parted like water against a stone as a 165 centimeter person sprinted through the empty space…and propelled straight into him. Rin knew the sensation of flying on a plane. Hell, he even tried paragliding back in Australia, much to Lori's consternation and Russel's amusement. But, this feeling was absolutely foreign to him. It was like diving, only backwards but he did not think that landing flat on his back and the wind nearly being knocked out of him was normal. On a side note, his subconscious had the gall to pipe, the ceiling looks particularly nice today.

Rin lost count of how long he was under the water. He actually did not remember hearing a splash. He resurfaced with a gasp and tried to rub the burning chlorine out of his eyes. As he treaded water, he felt as if he had been punched in the stomach…again.

Zolno was only an arm's length in front of him. Rin noticed that they were a couple meters from the edge of the pool where his captain and teammates stood dumbstruck along the edge. When his eyes focused back in on the Russian, he thought she just might punch him in the face.

"What the hell?" she snarled venomously, smacking her arm against the water which engulfed him once more in a wave. Her hair was a mess, tangled up on one side and completely covering the rest of her face. Her green irises darkened past forest green, past jade. He really did not know what color it was anymore. It definitely was not on the list of colors he learned during primary school.

But once his brain finally registered what she said to him, all thoughts of swallowing his pride went right out the window. "What do you mean 'what the hell?'" he barked back in her face and copied her wave. With a growl, he yanked his soaked bangs out of his eyes and squashed the urge to rip the strands out by their roots. "You're the one who just tackled me into the damn pool!" he hissed. "If anything, I should be the one asking you that. Have you lost your damn mind?!"

She cursed in Russian but Rin really could not care less what she said because he was fuming and on the verge of blowing a gasket. Shaking her head, Zolno switched back into Japanese, growling thickly, "Why did you do that at the pool? Why did you have to," she faltered and fumbled for the right words. Grunting in frustration and curling her fists next to her head, Katya continued on her rampage, "Why did you say that to them?" Rin felt the irritation bubbling up in the back of his throat and the pressure rising in his veins. "I thought they were your friends." Rin could not decide if he wanted to push her away (like Gou, like everyone because this was too close to home) or under the water, but he definitely did not want her talking about Haru or her opinions about his friendships. Or lack thereof… his subconscious stabbed.

"You were eavesdropping on me?" he spat. Like you're one to talk.

But she kept talking, and louder, "I thought they were your friends!" By this point she was nearly shrieking, but it lost most of the shrill effect as the heaviness of her Russian accent faded in and out.

"They were!" he roared. "But that's none of your business." He felt his lip curl and the water push against his legs as Zolno slowly floated away from him. Rin vaguely noticed his brain pleading to stop his mouth from running off, wherever his stream of consciousness was taking him. "But, I don't need them anymore," he explained haughtily just as he had with Haru a few hours prior. At this point his brain was screaming and Mikoshiba's warning tone subtly registered in his ear drums. The remaining Samezuka members were frozen in his periphery. Zolno's eyebrows were fully tilted; her mouth was pinched in a hard frown; and a quivering vein protruded from her temple.

"And I don't need you," Rin finished flatly.

If Zolno's face was a chalkboard with charts and equations – always equations – scattered across it, Rin's words were erasers. It was one of those moments where he would have at least expected her to recoil either from shock or revulsion, maybe even lash out again. But since when has she ever done what you expected? he thought to himself patronizingly.

Three seconds – he counted if only to keep his mind off the ringing in his ears – of silence passed through the room. No one moved. Not Mikoshiba, Nitori, Minami, Uozumi, not even Katya. Rin considered maybe if he retched in the pool it might be a good starting place for restitution. He thought he felt pitiful back in Australia. He thought he felt pathetic when he refused to take Gou's phone calls even after he was back two weeks into the trimester. But that was not the half of it. Matsuoka Rin thought he deserved to be at the bottom of the food chain. You're more a pilot fish than a shark, he declared mentally and let the venom of his words poison his veins.

Her eyes dilated in shock. The color drained from the irises and her pallor went a sickening shade between yellow and white. Katya lowered her head so her face hid behind a dark brown curtain of wet hair sans one eye. She bobbed in the waves without saying a word, staring at the bottom of the pool.

She snapped her gaze up again. Rin wanted someone, anyone (hell, even himself) to sock him in the gut. Or better yet to retrieve his words and shove them back down his throat. But you can't unring a bell, his conscience (reserved and drained) offered. Her one visible eye held him in a blank trance. "Fine," Katya finished in a dead tone.

Backtracking to the edge of the pool, Zolno hoisted herself out and maneuvered around the stunned Samezuka students to face Mikoshiba as her clothes sloshed everywhere. She tucked the rest of her hair behind an ear. Rin watched dumbly as pellets of chlorinated water flew off the tips of her unbound hair and sailed back into the center of the pool. "Our agreement is done," she stated, though to Rin it may have been more of a request, a plea.

Mikoshiba nodded and shrugged, attempting to relieve the tension that built so quickly in the room. "I did say to get him through prefecture's, didn't I?" He sent the second-year girl a soft smile.

Zolno bowed sloppily and made a beeline for the exit – making sure the keep her gaze down – and haphazardly picked up her shoes, phone, and hair tie by the door. Nitori stammered, "K-Katya-senpai…" but she pressed on without a second look.

The knot in his stomach was almost unbearable. Treading choppily to the rim of the pool, Rin croaked, "Ka–"

She slammed the door behind her and disappeared into the darkness beyond Samezuka Academy.

"–tya," he finished meekly. Tilting his head back to stare at the ceiling, Rin whispered pathetically (more to himself than anyone else), "Katya." But she was gone.

Someone cleared their throat from above and to his left. Rin met Mikoshiba's disappointed glare. He nodded and pushed off the pool edge and allowed himself to sink to the bottom, content with the sting of the chlorine and the loss of the clear view above him.

Shit.

---

*Like last chapter, there was too little Japanese in this section for me to switch between italics and standard fonts without having a huge block of italicized dialogue.

*I'm a physics dork. Don't worry too much about what this means other than a spring's greatest possible amount of energy to expend is when it's completely compressed or stretched.

*Dvigaite (Двигайте) – Move [plural imperative of Dvigat'(Двигать)]

I apologize for the extra wait and for any grammar or character problems through this chapter.

I feel like my writing has not been very consistent and I am so sorry for that. Due to some personal problems, I'm really struggling to find the right words. The last eighty percent of the story is outlined but my brain cannot seem to piece together what I want and what I think will do justice for all of the 'Free!' characters – particularly Rin and Rei, because their dynamics really cut to the core – and the ones that I've tried to create and give depth to.

(I always found it interesting that every time we see Rin's dad it is as a boy. Hmm…maybe KyoAni has something out there that would explain this better, but I took a stab at as to why Rin's nightmares revolve around this version of his father and not an adult. Just my two cents.)

It's really difficult to keep this cathartic (because that was why I started this whole project in the first place), but everything is so jumbled in my head right now.

However, I will still strive to improve this story and finish it for you guys, because you have stuck with me and I cannot put into words how much I appreciate that.

Thank you so much for the favorites, follows, and review (shout-out to JuMoFi of the March Hare)!

Anyway, feedback is still welcome, whether it be criticism (though constructive is always preferred) or praise. Is Katya getting boring? Do her reactions make sense? Are the others still acting like good supporting characters?

Thanks again and until next time.