It was like he was floating. Maybe he was. The world was so pale and colourless. Usually, the lack of colour would have frightened him, but in that moment, he found found it soothing. The blank silence drowned out the noise that usually filled his head. The drumming din of "swim harder," "swim faster," "winwinwin" was so faint. All he could really hear was "I'll make you proud," and even it was peaceful in his white-washed world. It was like the world had been dipped in bleach and wrung out to fade out all the colour. He closed his eyes.
"Rin."
The voice cracked the silence, and the landscape around him rippled. Rin. That was his name. He had forgotten. He was so lost in the tranquillity. His eyes, vibrant compared to his surroundings, opened to watch the ripples of the sky with what could only be seen as stoic interest. (Briefly, he wondered if this was how dolphins felt when swimming underwater.) His thoughts shifted to wonder if he was dead. Maybe death was just sweet relief from all of his worries. Here, he had no worries at all.
"Rin!"
The voice was so loud that the ripples churned at its volume. Rin's dreamscape was turbulent and threatening to collapse around him.
A dream. Rin now realised this was not death. He was locked in his own mind.
"Rin!"
That time the voice sent the world crashing down. The white filled his lungs and choked him until his eyes opened to a reality, his reality, that was just as pale as the surreality he had been jerked from. The only reason he knew he was not still asleep was that he felt heavy, like heavy pebbles filled his pockets and shoes. Maybe all of his organs had been replaced with rocks. That was how heavy he felt.
He lifted his hand and stared at the thing on his index finger. He had never been the best with medical terms. He just knew whatever rested on his finger was a device used in hospitals. He managed to pick out in his groggy mind that it measured heartbeat. Or blood pressure. His thoughts were as heavy as the rest of him.
He began to piece things together slowly. White walls. White sheets. Beeping monitors. Wires.
No.
IV tubes.
There was the overpowering smell of disinfectant on everything, and with it came Rin's old loathing of hospitals. He opened his mouth to speak, but he felt as if cotton filled his throat.
A doctor stepped in (More white, Rin had thought). Suddenly there was a little light in his eyes, a hand in his face, instructions tossed at him ("hold out your arm," "tell me how many fingers you see," "sit up if you can"). He leant back against the headboard having sat up - much to his cumbersome body's discomfort. He tried (and failed) to not bite the tongue depressor in half as it entered his mouth. He was relieved when the doctor exited and left behind a vibrant nurse. She brightened up the room like a tropical fish trapped in a grey-rocked tank. He watched her flit about to note his vitals as he slid his eyes closed again.
There had been a kitten. Rin remembered its calico coat. He had spotted it in a tree on his jog. He had reached and called for it, but the kitten remained trembling in the tree. His decision had been to go up if it was not coming down.
Then there was just panic and weightlessness and nothing at all.
His eyes were open again, but the nurse was gone. He was alone once more. Panic scrambled to join the cotton in his throat to choke him. He had to move. He pressed his hands to the bed and ignored the sting as he used them to help with the arduous task of lifting up his stone-filled body. He could not ignore the sharp pain that shot through every single one of his nerves, however. He hissed in annoyance and tumbled down again. The cotton had grown so thick he coughed, and his hands balled into fists. He tried to push himself up again. And again. And a-fucking-gain.
Ruby eyes caught him when he was spitting out the cotton in a slur of vulgarities drunken with pain killers that were wearing off and frustration. "Rin! You should be in bed!" His sister's arm guided around his waist, only to be viciously shoved away. When their eyes met, she whispered something. Red communicating with red in a way that only siblings could do so well. Rin kept staring at them even after the meaning of the look had been translated. He kept staring even as his eyes began to burn.
Crybaby, his mind hissed, but the self-inflicted insult could not stop it from happening. Incarnadine clouds gathered in his eyes, and fat saltwater raindrops dripped down his cheeks. Tremors travelled from his chest and spread through the rest of him as he wailed loud and ugly. He could usually hide it or hold it in, but the despair at what his sister had told him had shattered his every barrier.
You can't, her eyes had said. I'm sorry Rin. You can't.
He could not stand. He could not walk. He could not swim.
He was still shaking as Gou wrapped her arms around him again. He did not push her away that time. He just slumped down as he kept sobbing, and he had coated her with his snot and tears. He tried to make words, but nothing tumbled out but gibberish. He could not make himself coherent. Not that it mattered. He was not talking to Gou anyway. He was talking to himself, to his father.
By the time Rin was granted leave from the hospital, he had stopped crying. Honestly, he had stopped doing. His eyes had lost their old vibrancy, and what was left was permanent cloudy red. He felt empty as he watched the hospital disappear from the backseat of his mother's car. He could faintly hear music, but he did not listen close enough to notice his mother was playing his favourite album as they rode "home."
Rin was not sure if he could still call it that after not really living there for longer than a week at a time for the past nine years. He had thought of the pool as his home. The beach. Not the bedroom waiting for him at the small, one-story house filled with memories he could not bear to think of right then. He would rather be at Samezuka, but his doctor had told him the stairs and long distance between his classes was too much of a strain for his body. He was slowly recovering, and even when he did, he could not swim competitively. His body couldn't take the difficult training it had before.
He grimaced at his crutches that he had to use to struggle on the stairs with to the front door. He could feel his family watching him, but he refused to acknowledge their worries as he pushed open the door with the boot of a crutch and made it to the backroom that was his room. The room with the window that gave a clear view of the ocean that was his father's grave and had became his home.
Posters covered the walls, and there were various seashells and shark teeth he had collected when he was little. There were trophies and medals, from bronze to silver to finally bright, victorious gold. He looked at them, and then his hands tore down the posters, shredded them like scissors. Down went the ribbons that were in tattered shreds on the floor when he was finished with them. The trophies and medals crashed loudly in his black trash bin. He broke the shells, the shark teeth, and the he finally hurled a crutch right across the room to curl up on his bed in defeat.
That night he found himself crying again.
It was not so hard to get used to things again. Granted, he had withdrawn deeper into himself, but he had not had many acquaintances to begin with. Those he had had were all on the swim team. Nitori tried to speak to him, but he was easy to avoid with their gap in grade levels. Rin even avoided his family when he was home. He would lock himself in his bare room and sit with his window open to allow ocean air to fill his nose. He would stare at his empty ceiling and pray for his thoughts to be just as empty. Any thoughts that tried to slither into that quiet place were drowned out by the music that played non-stop from his media dock. He was trying to reach the same level of peacefulness he had managed to acquire in that dream. The only problem was that every time he actually did fall asleep he would have a nightmare. Drowning, pain, falling, screaming. Every single one was so very different, but the same chilling panic factor washed over him every time he was thrust into them. He would wake blindly searching for some sort of relief he could not find. He usually jogged the nightmares away, but now he could not. Without his usual outlet, the terror just built in him until he just stopped sleeping.
Sometimes, he would pass out and be filled with the best kind of blackness that hardly felt like sleep at all. Not a dream, but it was better than nightmares. One day he woke up from one of his faints to feel a warmth on his chest. He opened his eyes and let his gaze rest on a small bundle of fur for a few moments. It must have crawled in through his open window. He sat up and startled it awake. Before the little kitten could hurry off, he scooped him up to carry him to the bathroom. He was quiet as he gave the cat a bath and dried him off. (It was a him. He had checked.) Its brown, grey coat dried to matted white fur that he combed out with an old, wire-toothed brush. He put the cat down only to watch it trot right out the window again.
He sighed heavily and went back to lay on his bed. It was not like he cared anyway.
A few days later, the cat came back with a friend. Rin stared in disbelief before simply cleaning that one up as well. He fed them some meat he had laying about in his room. He had stopped eating more than gummy candies and soft drinks a while ago (might as well let his body go to hell if he could not train). He needed something to do with the food his mother and sister kept trying to feed him. The cats ate it hungrily. Rin watched him with a bored look, but the clouds in his eyes had cleared just faintly.
The cats forced his empty mind to think about something, but oddly, Rin found himself not minding. Perhaps he had reached a stage of emptiness where he just did things on automatic. Taking in the cats had became automatic. They were another distraction. He let them come and go as they please, simply letting them have a place to eat, sleep, and get cleaned up. The cats were easy to care for. Even when Rin had to tend for the occasional injury, they still hardly disturbed the bland routine he had made for himself. (wake up, school, snack, bed). What really disturbed his routine were the green eyes he found peeking over his windowsill one day.
For a brief moment, he had thought he had found another cat, but then he realised cat's were not that big and did not have those kind of green eyes. He tried to ignore Makoto at first. It was weird. He knew the other was like a Mother Hen to, well, everyone, but you would figure after a few months people would get some sort of hint to just leave him alone.
Then again, he had ignored Makoto for years, and he had still had the audacity to call him in the middle of the night and leave him a voicemail.
Makoto was never there long. He just dropped by and seemed to spy on him for a bit before disappearing. Rin thought it was strange, and if it was anyone but Makoto, he might have even found it creepy. But the fact was it was Makoto Tachibana, and he supposed for that reason alone it was, in its own peculiar way, okay. So after a while, he let Makoto's dropping in on him to part of his routine. Then came the gifts.
Flowers - white and yellow yarrows. His childhood gummy snacks. A shark keychain. Trinkets and trivial things that Rin paid no real attention to. He would eat the snacks and put the flowers on his windowsill, but other than that, he refused to really acknowledge them. The keychain rested next to the vase he had put the flowers in. When he managed to gather about five more vases of yarrows, he began to pay attention.
And it was annoying.
Really annoying.
He had no idea what the hell Makoto was even trying to do.
That was why, for the first time, he left the house with the foldable cane in his pocket that the doctor had insisted on. He did not tell his sister or his mother that he was leaving. He did not care if they knew. He was just confused and irritated that the flowers were taking over his room, and he had no idea what to do with the cursed things. But for some peculiar reason, he could not throw them away.
He stopped partway to the house, and he sat on a bench he knew was a definite landmark between the long stretch to his house. It was not long before he saw Makoto walking down the sidewalk to his house with his jacket about him and a bouquet of yarrows in hand. Rin took out an earbud and reached for a small pebble underneath his foot to beam Makoto in the head with.
The other yelped and fell over, terrified, peering out of watery green eyes to meet a frustrated glare from the other teenager. "What the hell are you doing?" Rin asked his voice a bit raw for being in disuse for so long. He cleared his throat and kept glaring. Makoto averted his eyes and reached up to rub the nape of his neck. He was quiet, and that irritated Rin even more. He did not even think about the fact he was feeling something besides apathy for the first time, since he had came home from the hospital. He picked up another rock and threw it. Makoto's reflexes reacted that time, and he managed to block it.
"R-Rin!" Makoto managed to bumble out only to be snapped at.
"What the hell are you doing?! Leaving me flowers and shit?! I don't even know what the hell they are! They're crowding up my room! It smells like a god damn garden! And you keep fucking spying on me! It's been a month! A whole fucking month of your damn, weirdass eyes creeping up on me! You're scaring the cats! It's weird! You have other people to bother don't you?! Just leave me the hell alone!" Rin bared his teeth and narrowed his eyes that still had bags beneath them from his insomnia. "That's all I came to say," he finished in a quieter tone as he moved to sit up with a grunt. He really had walked farther than he was probably supposed to. He had just gotten started using his legs again without the assistance of crutches. He was a bit sore and stiff from sitting, but he was certain he was not in such a condition that he would not make it home. He could hear quiet footsteps behind him, and he sighed heavily.
He stopped suddenly, and Makoto nearly bumped into him in surprise. He glared at him. He took out the cane and jabbed Makoto in the chest with. "Stop. It."
"Why?"
The question took Rin by surprise. He had not expected Makoto to argue. He scowled. "Why not?" Rin swore he saw a smile of amusement cross the other's lips. He frowned and turned around, folding the cane back up and sliding it into his pocket. He decided to ignore Makoto the rest of the way home, refusing to utter one word to the large brunet behind him.
When he reached his house, he went inside and glared at Makoto, who was still wearing that same irritating and amused smile on his face. He slammed the door.
"Plan: Get Rid of Makoto" was not a success. In fact, it had backfired. Rather than stop sending him flowers, Makoto doubled his efforts. Rin woke up one day to see a pot of them outside with a little note that said "Please take care of me" with a dumb happy emote at the end of it. He was mostly frustrated because he was not sure what Makoto was trying to accomplish by being so nice to him. He hardly even noticed himself slightly changing as he began to react to the gifts. Makoto had started leaving things other than flowers. One day Rin even found homemade kimchi sitting on his open windowsill.
He was not entirely sure what made him start responding back. He began to leave Makoto things too. At first, they were little notes telling him to fuck off. Then he began making the notes into origami cranes and flowers. He began to make them into something new every time he sent them. He told himself it was because he just had nothing to do all day, not because he was actually acknowledging Makoto's little annoying presents. Lying to himself made it easier to try and be empty again.
When he found white Sweet-Williams in a pot on his windowsill, he just took them inside and put them with the yarrows that were still growing. Rin had been taking care of then. The cats liked them. He was such a good liar he believed what he told himself. Still, no matter how much he denied that a new attitude was forming, he could not deny that Makoto was worming his way into the hole he had buried himself in. That, or Makoto was digging a damn grave next to him and refusing to budge.
One day, Makoto brought him cat food, right through his bedroom door. He came in while Gou was at swim practise (shouldn't Makoto have been there too?) and his mother was at work. He sat right in Rin's room, and he just smiled as Rin pretended not to notice he was there. He played with the strays that were in Rin's room. It became a new thing the Makoto did. He would come in while the others were gone and sit with him. He would talk about nothing, boring things that Rin found himself listening to. Ran had lost a tooth. The little white cat Makoto was fond of was getting a little chubby. He had failed his English test. Every day things. Rin never responded, but that never stopped Makoto from talking.
Makoto had began to stay longer and longer, more and more, but he did it so gradually Rin didn't notice until he realised Makoto had began visiting him at least once a day and talking to him. It had worked. Makoto was laying next to him in his hole, and the worst part was, Rin did not mind. He could not bring himself too. He was enjoying the company too much. He liked the stories, the way Makoto sometimes brought children's books over to read to the cats, how Makoto had this bad habit of buying him potted plants and making is old bland room look like a greenhouse.
It took just another month for Rin to start responding, bit by bit, to what Makoto said. Not enough to call it a conversation, but it was something. He would make one sentence comments on the stories, on the plants, nod to something.
"Do you know what Sweet-Williams mean?"
Rin stared at Makoto and shook his head. He wondered if that was what the name of the white flowers were. He had never asked or bothered to look them up. He was watering them that day, so he figured that was why he was asking.
"Grant me one smile," he said.
The watering can (hand-painted with little grey blobs Rin took for sharks courtesy of Ran and Ren), clattered to the floor. Rin straightened up and gave Makoto a warning look before dusting his hands off on his pants and going to switch the album on his boombox.
Makoto sighed, and Rin could feel the disappointed smile on the other's face. He wondered why it unnerved him. Rin tried to sort it out, only to give up and decide not to think about it. When Makoto came over the next time he was there to greet him with his hand over his mouth. He had drawn a permanent marker smile on the back of it.
Makoto's smile then nearly broke his face. Rin just looked away and kept his own hidden behind the hand that he had turned upside down to make a frown. He told himself he was just trying to amuse Makoto, so he would get fed up and leave.
But even he didn't believe that lie.
He was not sure when they had became a strangest sort of friends. He did not know when he began actually talking to Makoto about the cats and his plants. Maybe it was when Makoto had brought him the dwarf sunflowers or the yellow narcissus. Rin had commented it was stupid to always be brought the flowers because he was a guy, and Makoto could not be courting him because he didn't even like him. "I tolerate you," he had said. He thought he saw Makoto's smile falter at that, and he had left earlier than normal.
Rin was starting to wonder why he was lying any more when he laid awake in his bed that night.
The next day, Makoto rather stubbornly gave him a flower crown. Rin had insisted that he was ridiculous. So ridiculous, that he laughed for the first time, since he had watched his aspirations crumble into nothing. If Rin thought Makoto had smiled wide before, that time the smile was ten times larger. He wore the flower crown for the rest of the day "just because it was that stupid."
The days went like that. Faster and faster, and Rin was hardly aware that it was time for graduation until his teacher announced the proceedings to the class. His third year was supposed to be the year that he was scouted out to the Olympics, accomplishing the dream he had been saying he would accomplish for years. It was supposed to be his best year, but right then all he could remember was hospital rooms and check-ups and endless apologies for not being able to fix it.
He decided he did not want to see Makoto that day. He wanted to avoid him at all costs. He went to the beach near his home and found a secret place to sit and rest on the sand. He let the water dampen his uniform and watched the sky move above him. He closed his eyes, the evening sun on his eye lids created the illusion that the world was pure white, blank and empty. He fell asleep in the sand, in that envy of emptiness he could covet forever but never have.
He woke up to see hair just a bit darker than the sand and closed peridot eyes. There was an Iwatobi uniform jacket slung over him, and a backpack underneath his head. "Why?" The words left his mouth without warning, without thought. He was surprised they slipped past his lips.
"Because you're a brat."
That took him by an even greater surprise. The too-green eyes were pointed at him now. His gaze was intense and steady, and Rin found himself paralysed to the spot as he stared back.
"You're worse than my siblings. You're selfish. You only think about yourself. You whine a lot. Complain even more. Can't ever make things easy. Like how you love the flowers, and then pretend you don't like them. Like how you don't just 'tolerate' me. How no matter how indifferent you treat me, you expect me to come back to you.
"How you've gotten into the habit of hiding smiles from me, but I can tell they're there because your eyes shine differently. Like the way I know that keychain has been moved from the flower pot to under your pillow or that I spotted the flower crown hiding with your albums. How you've been lying to yourself for so long, you've made yourself blind to the fact you like me too.
"A brat because you got hurt. Bad, and yeah, your dream of swimming the Olympics is gone, but you can do so many great things. You just take it for granted because you can't get what you want. Like how you've helped all those cats or how you can probably run your own greenhouse."
Rin stared at him in some sort of shock as he absorbed the words. "... Makoto, what the fuck."
Makoto only smiled softly. "Sorry. I've been holding all that in for months. Did I say too much?"
A small nod of Rin's head told Makoto that he had. Rin looked away and at the jacket over his shoulders. He sat up and kept it around him. "Fine. I like you. Happy?"
A small smile played at the corners of Makoto's mouth, and he shook his head. "Not yet. One more thing," he said and then he pulled Rin's face down to meet his lips. He kept the kiss tender as a hand went to the back of Rin's head to keep him there.
It was like melting, like tingles, like tranquillity, like everything and nothing. In other words, it was too indescribable for Rin to think of a proper word. He just knew that he felt at ease as their lips moved against each other, as Makoto's fingers played in his hair and held onto him. He felt the peace he had been praying for fill him. It did not empty him like he expected it to. It swelled inside of him until all the dark thoughts that constantly had lingered in his mind were pushed out.
"You're the biggest brat in the world, but I love you Matsuoka Rin."
The lonely corners of Rin's mouth crinkled upward, and he found it hard not to be a crybaby again. Not because he was sad, but maybe, just maybe, his third year really had turned out to be his best after all.