The stretch of silence is longer this time, and it's uncomfortable.

It's weird because Haru realizes that some of the silences before were not, as though Sousuke is an easy person to be quiet with, which … makes a lot of logical sense, but also is unsettling. Except that now it doesn't really matter, because the silence isn't comfortable. But rather than it being the kind that is strained because they're searingly mad at each other, it's more like an awkward silence that is filled only with the very present and lingering echo of Sousuke's burning words.

They crawl across Haru's skin, and he tries to brush them away, but he's not very successful, and it's really not helping at all that Sousuke keeps glancing at him as though he wants to say more. Though, Haru can't tell what it is he's itching to get out, because the air around him feels hesitant, like he's contemplating whether or not he should try to erase away the words that are so stalely sitting on the air between them. But Haru doesn't attempt to say anything about it either, because Sousuke wouldn't be able to do that even if he tried.

"Fuck!"

He's jarred a bit, when his shoulders are suddenly crushed by Sousuke's dominant hands, and he's jerked off to the side, partway into the grass, and forced to stand in front of Sousuke like a shield.

He wrinkles his nose. "What?"

Sousuke points off to the other side of the road, where a large, black-gold snake is curled up in the path where Haru had just been walking. He sighs, even though his body quietly ripples with a chill.

"It's just a snake."

"Yeah? The other thing was 'just a spider' and the pack of carnivores were 'just dogs.' This place is trying to kill us."

"Didn't you read the warning on the brochure before you came?"

"You're not funny."

"Alright, I have an idea. I'll offer you to it as a sacrifice, and then make my escape while it's feasting on your enormous body."

"Would you let it go? I told you it wasn't on purpose … And quit making jabs at my size."

"How can I? You're like a walking statute from the Guinness Book of World Records. I bet there's an ox somewhere that looks just like you. Did you know the ground shakes when you walk?"

"Alright, enough!" Sousuke hisses, squeezing the circulation out of Haru's biceps.

He winces. "Relax. If we walk around it slowly, it's not going to bother us."

"If I get bit, I am going to strangle you."

"You are such a baby," Haru sighs. "And anyway, you'll be too busy foaming at the mouth probably."

"You're walking in front."

"Well, it's not like a have a choice. You're crushing me."

Sousuke's grip lets up only a little bit, but Haru takes that with gratitude. He starts forward, and Sousuke shuffles behind him, crouched a little lower as he peers at the snake directly over Haru's shoulder. He steers them at an angle as they pass it, keeping Haru in front, as promised. The snake watches them. It coils tighter into itself when they get as close as they're going to get, and it lets out a vicious hiss, but that's all that it does, and they've overcome it in no time.

Sousuke keeps looking back over his shoulder as though it's going to follow. Haru just rolls his eyes.

"See? That wasn't so bad."

"Don't patronize me, Nanase. Some of us are made out of actual flesh and blood and are not impervious to the elements. I'm sorry that whatever created you forgot to add a sense of empathy."

Haru purses his lips. "At least when I insult you, I'm being mildly sarcastic. How much time have you spent venting in your diary about —"

"Shit. Shit!"

Haru's jerked to a halt again, but this time he's not as much thrown off, because his eyes are already wide on the path in front of them, and it is actively hissing with a blanket of slow-curling snakes, all piled up on top of each other and stretched out across the entirety of the road.

"Oh, that's way worse."

Sousuke's hands shoot up to cover Haru's mouth, as though the snakes are listening to him. Now caught in the fold of Sousuke's arms, Haru stumbles a bit as he's dragged backward several steps.

"God," Sousuke breathes to himself, trembling again, and this time Haru can feel it across his whole back. He's aware when Sousuke drops his forehead on top his hair, but he's sure the larger man has no awareness that he's doing so himself. Also, he's still got his hands over Haru's mouth, and is practically squeezing him against his chest.

"I can't do this. Just open up the ground and get it over with."

Haru tries to speak, but it's entirely muffled by the larger man's hands.

"We're going back the other way."

Sousuke starts to turn them both, but Haru plants his feet and urgently taps on his forearm to get his attention.

"What now?" he growls. "Are you innately obligated to resist every single thing that I say?"

Haru licks his palm, and he cries out in disgust, releasing him immediately. His skin is salty.

"Look," Haru says, pointing out into the distance where a row of small, man-made lights shines an indeterminable distance away. Doesn't matter though. They can see it, and they know that it means people, and possible cellphone service, maybe even their lost guide.

There's hesitation in Sousuke's reaction, but then he shakes his head, eyes darting to the path in front of them.

"No. Hell no."

"That is exactly what we're out here for."

"It's …" He struggles, waving both hands out to the distant lights, and then pointing dramatically to the snake farm in front of them. "We are not walking through this!"

Haru's eyes dart to the knee-length grass on either side of them. "We could …"

"Don't you dare. We can't even see what's in there."

"Then we'll just have to go really slow."

"You're a nut case. You have a death wish. These things are most assuredly poisonous, because probably fucking everything that lives here is, and you want to walk through them to get to the lights way on the other side? What if it's just a power plant?"

"It's still better than nothing."

"Nanase …" Then he just sighs, a long drawn out sigh, that Haru ends up counting the seconds on. "We can't …" He pinches the bridge of his nose, eyes closed, head shaking. "We can't do this."

"Yes we can. Just walk on your toes and watch where you're stepping," Haru says, moving forward.

"Nanase … Nanase!"

Haru doesn't turn back to acknowledge him. He inches up to the edge of the road block and stares down at the low-hissing snakes at his feet. They don't lash out, so he picks up one careful foot, and steps down lightly in a small open space of dirt within the pile. His eyes search, and he takes another step, and then one more.

"Oh my god," Sousuke whines behind him. Haru doesn't look over his shoulder. He just simply trusts that Sousuke will follow, and he's aware of his large presence when he does.

"You have to be lighter on your feet than that," he says without turning around.

"I haven't even done anything yet."

"Doesn't matter. Your presence is too heavy. You're going to scare them, and then they'll bite you."

"Stop it. Just stop it with that, okay?" he hisses back. "God. I can't believe … Ugh." Sousuke groans. It's half frustrated, half anxious, and it isn't until Haru feels him take the first careful step that he looks back.

It's comical. And were this not a very roulette kind of situation, then he would laugh, because Sousuke is visibly trying to be light by scrunching his whole body upward, but it's very evident that he has horrible balance and has probably never walked on his toes a day in his life.

"You have to breathe," Haru instructs. "If you don't relax, you're going to fall over."

"Stop talking to me."

He says it, but he listens — as best he can anyway. His shoulders drop a fraction, at least, and he takes his second step forward, putting him fully in the midst of the danger. Haru pauses where he is, standing deathly still as he waits and watches for Sousuke to catch up. He's about an arm's distance away when he glances up to Haru, who nods at him and then turns to continue forward.

It's painstaking, the slowness with which they're having to navigate this field of mines. Haru's sweating even heavier now than when he was after running from the dingoes, and he's sure Sousuke's no different. He just hopes the snakes aren't bothered by the occasional drop of saltwater.

A strangled noise of comes from behind him, and he turns just in time to catch his breath and throw out his hands to intercept Sousuke's body from falling over. Except that, in order to do so, he has to lift one foot off of the ground and lean his weight forward to keep from being pulled down. So now, they're propped against each other's shoulders, panting heavily, grips tight on each other's arms, and Haru can't put his foot down.

"Oh fuck," Sousuke moans into his neck.

"Don't panic," Haru breathes. "Can you push me up without falling forward?"

"No."

"Are you saying that because you can't or because you refuse to?"

"I can't, Nanase!" he hisses. "I'm just a little bit heavy. Or weren't all of your insults meant to remind us all!"

"Alright fine. I'll push you."

Sousuke snorts a laugh. It tickles on his skin. "Not with those arms you won't."

Haru makes a sour face, but it's a waste, because Sousuke can't see it. "I'm not that weak."

"Sure. When's the last time you did any weight training?"

"That's not relevant."

"Well it fucking is now. You've never lifted anything over ten kilos in your life, have you?"

"I'm a swimmer."

"That hardly makes a difference right now."

"It's not nothing," Haru argues.

"You're going to put that on the table and hope that it doesn't kill us both? I'm not sure I'm very willing to stake my life on whether or not you can bench a hundred kilograms."

Haru lets a breath fall out of his mouth. "Why the fuck are you so heavy?"

"Because I'm 192 centimeters, and I weight train. Also, red meat and potatoes exist in this world, and I'm not allergic to them."

"We don't need to go into that."

"Oh," Sousuke says, voice lifting with interest. "Is that a sore spot?"

"No."

"And here I thought the mackerel thing was just another unhealthy obsession."

"Okay, enough. We can't stand here forever. I'm only on one foot. And if you're as heavy as you say, I can't keep you up forever."

Sousuke goes quiet, and it takes a trembling moment of thinking and breathing and sweating and trying to ignore the steady hissing underneath them to come up with a plan. He's not sure he's really actually got one, but they have to try something. The quads in his leg are already straining.

"Okay. Grab my hands."

They adjust their grips blindly, putting more pressure into each other's shoulders as they let go of each other's arms to find their hands and lock their fingers together. Sousuke's hands are huge. Bigger than Makoto's even, and Haru has to try hard not to dwell on it too long. They're also sweaty, but he can't say much more for his own. They grip each other tightly.

"We're both going to have to push, but you have to be intentional about it. Don't overshoot. If you're too aggressive, I'm just going to fall backward."

Sousuke tches. "If you're too light, I'm landing on my face."

"I'm not going to drop you. I promise."

Sousuke goes quiet again. Haru waits, tempering his breath as he focuses on the slowly settling tremble of Sousuke's body. He calms, more trustingly than Haru expects him to, but Haru doesn't say anything about it.

"Okay," Sousuke whispers. "On your count then."

Haru nods. "One. Two. Three."

He tenses his muscles, solidifying them as best he can into unmoving rocks of defiance. For just the briefest of seconds, neither of them goes anywhere, but as they slowly adjust, the weight is redistributed and the pressure manipulated between them. Sousuke's body slowly starts to rock back into place.

Haru's fingers tighten between the other's, his arms just barely shaking the further away Sousuke gets. He is heavy, truly. But Haru does not allow him to fall, as promised, and Sousuke looks at him with much more calm in his teal eyes than he has across this entire night. Haru looks at him too, a small pinch of effort etched on his brow, but he doesn't feel weak at all. Nor is he worried. And after one more suspended heartbeat, Sousuke's made it right way up, and Haru finds a spot to rest his other foot.

They exhale.

Their hands remain locked between them, and they take a moment just to breath and allow the sweep of relief to settle over them before its snatched back up by the realization that they're still only halfway through the minefield.

"Alright?" Sousuke asks quietly.

Haru, whose head is down right now, still staring at the mass of snakes under their feet, just closes his eyes for a moment and tries to convince his body to stop shaking. He hadn't thought about the amount of concentrated energy it takes to bare another human's weight while staying steadily balanced on one foot, and now he can feel the exhaustion quivering all the more intensely up his leg. His arms don't exactly feel completely in his control either.

"Give me a minute," he mumbles toward the ground, and Sousuke just stands there, waiting, surprisingly patiently, as Haru tries to regain composure over his own muscles.

"Hey."

He looks up, squinting against the burn of sweat in his eyes. Sousuke's gaze is sincere, looking back at him this time, and it's almost reminiscent of the look he had given him in the car for that one frozen moment that Haru was sitting on his knee. Except that this look is kinder, and maybe even a little bit soft around the edges.

It appears as though he's lost his train of thought for a moment, or that he suddenly changes his mind about what he was going to say, but then he allows himself a very small, encouraging smile.

"I'm impressed."

Haru's not very in control of the way his lips turn up at the corners. "I told you."

"You don't have to get a big head about it. I'm just trying to give you a boost of confidence so we can keep moving. We're still standing in a pile of snakes, you know."

Haru nods.

Sousuke inversely shakes his head, but it's with a breath of something like awe. "This is the wildest thing I've ever done in my life."

"At least you'll have something to tell your kids."

"I'm still not sure if I really want kids."

"No?"

"Yeah, I think they're loud. And I don't know if I trust myself to be that kind of responsible for another living thing."

"Mm … I think they're loud too, but I suppose I've gotten used to it, being around my siblings —"

"I thought you were an only child."

"Oh, I was talking about Ren and Ran."

"Tachibana's brother and sister?"

"Yeah." Haru shrugs. "I mean, I help him take care of them often enough, they might as well be mine too."

Sousuke huffs out a chuckle and shakes his head again. "You are full of surprises, Nanase."

Haru elects not to respond to that. "Shall we continue?"

"Yeah. Your sweat's grossing me out."

"That's your sweat."

"No it's not."

"It is, but whatever."

They release each other, both of them drying their palms off on their clothes, and then they cautiously continue forward, moving even slower than before, and Haru checks back over his shoulder more often this time, but Sousuke keeps his balance, and still seems considerably calmer than before.

Somehow, they make it, and not a single snake decides to wise up and snap at them along the way. And because that's amazing within itself, the very moment that Haru takes Sousuke's hand to help him leap the last step over, they bounce quickly away, and then stop to look back at the hurdle they just conquered.

The laughter bursts out of them breathlessly and immediately, and they have to take a moment to double over and wheeze with delirious disbelief.

Haru's feeling extremely light-headed at this point, and he's not sure how much of that is the heat, or his hunger, or the thirst and exhaustion, or if it's just all a side effect of nearly dying twice tonight (Or, maybe three times. The spider counts.).

"Holy shit," Sousuke gasps, leaning with one palm on his knee. "I can't believe we made that."

"And you wanted to go back the other way."

"We most assuredly should have gone back the other way. Are you shitting me? That was completely reckless. What kind of luck are you made out of? Because I can't tell at this point."

Haru allows himself a smirk. "I'm the good kind. You're the one that's been attracting shit like this." He gestures back to the snakes.

"Fuck you," Sousuke says, but there's no ire in it.

It isn't until now that they realize they're still holding hands, and they drop each other's grip quickly, after an awkward second of shifting glances.

Sousuke clears his throat and straightens his back, turning to walk away. "Alright, let's get moving. I'm starving."

Haru follows without any qualms this time.