tsumex - Tumblr blog

tsumex · 5 years

Text

‘Cause the night is, baby, when all the demons come out. (Rinharu fanfiction--Free!)

It's always been hit-or-miss for them--or maybe it's just that they've been running from their issues too successfully.

Dammit.

Dammit, dammit, dammit.

Haruka has never been one for swearing much, but every expletive he knows is currently running a litany in his head, twisting over and under and back again through the convoluted mess in his head. He’s angry—not angry, not exasperated, not decidedly anything, and that uncertainty only adds to the resultant irritation. He’s always known his mind, he thinks—maybe even prided himself on the lack of complication in his thought process—and he curses this past year, too, for sending that stronghold teetering on its foundation. Like the quivering of shattered glass the tension in the air stands as he lies in bed, in the same bed as Rin, warmed by the body heat of the only ascertainable source of all his problems.

The day has been—it’s been one of the strangest Haruka has ever experienced—which is not saying much, given his generally uninteresting yardstick, but he’s pretty sure being whisked off to a foreign country without notice would figure as unprecedented by anyone’s standards. It’s not only that, though. Being so up close and personal with figments of Rin’s past had made him a kind of uncomfortable his own limited vocabulary couldn’t even begin to describe. It’s never pleasant, he’s realizing, to have illusions shattered, even less so to be made to introspect, and it’s that, and more—this panorama of everything he’d missed all the years that slipped by like beads on a string, so stuck in his own perception of betrayal, of not talking to Rin, or writing to Rin, blind to anything else.

He wants to bury his head in his hands, drown out everything else. The epiphany that somewhere inside him, he’s always believed that Rin had had it easy, easier than him left to agonize over and ponder the whys and the hows, haunts him, has haunted him ever since they’d gone to that godforsaken beach and Rin’s eyes had looked to something Haruka couldn’t see. Limpid with something Haruka couldn’t reach as he’d talked as someone would talk of an old flame. Haruka—he’s used to being on the outside looking in, but that had been—something else altogether. And since he couldn’t place it—again—he’d disguised with an annoyance not altogether feigned. Not interested, uncaring, all the labels he’s always stuck by, they’d made life easier for him. But—and he’s only just realizing this, too—they’ve left him with a void that begs the question of whether he’d really ever had the pulse of what he was feeling, or if he only thought it because he never felt anything much at all. Another illusion, another obliteration.

He’d never thought Rin would apologize. Penitence and Rin—they’ve always been poles apart, and it was whiplash to Haruka, seeing it. The Rin he knew would never—but has it really been that long? Has that Rin Haruka knew really walked so far along the path away from him? It’d left him fumbling for words then, it’s left him grasping for something appropriate to feel now—and that’s the only thing that hasn’t changed between them. And so, more strikingly by connection, where does that flux leave himself?

Has he really

Not progressed at all?

It’d never bothered him before. He’d always figured he’d get by, one way or another. It’d only been when—and he can still hear Rin’s voice, raised, lethal as a gunshot, don’t you have a dream—when the bruising hold on his shoulders had blazed a trail right into something dormant in him, that he’d gotten a glimpse of it. Where it had been not just getting by like a match into water, like oh.

So this is emotion.

He’s had people care for him. He’s cared for people, too, he thinks. As far as caring goes for someone like him, that is. But Rin—Rin is a conundrum, making Haruka feel by turns anxious, irritated and—hungry, even, when he sees the easy camaraderie between him and his homestay parents, for lack of something like that to call his own. Does he care for Rin? Does Rin, in turn, care for him? They’re all questions that loom like apparitions, ready to jump out at him from the shadows. He just doesn’t know, but all in all, he doesn’t like one bit the idea of a world where Rin is his only anchor. He’s passive, not helpless—but it’s been a reinforcement of the latter all day, and some part of him had been looking forward to the night, time away from Rin and in his own comfortable space to ponder over—or, alternatively, escape from—it all.

But here they are.

He’s never—done so many things he’s done in the span of this past month. Unbidden, the vision of Makoto’s face, the emotion dancing in the usually tranquil green eyes and how Haruka hadn’t even stopped to listen, swims into focus. It hurts like the phantom pain of a lost limb, and Haruka smothers his sudden gasp into the pillow. He doesn’t know how to fix it. He doesn’t even know what he’ll do without Makoto, and he clenches his eyes shut against the ocean of regret—so many of them—that suddenly lurches in his chest. Forcibly, he evens his breathing out, hoping sleep will claim his exhausted senses before—

“Haru?”

His eyes fly open before he’s had time to think about it. For a moment, he considers pretending to be asleep, but the stiffening of his posture must have given him away, because Rin keeps talking.

“I told you I’ve always admired you, right?”

Haruka wants to shake him, then, because of course and how could he forget those words, so uncharacteristic of, once again, the Rin he knew—but he’s quickly finding out that the Rin he knew is nothing but a mirage of fireshine and shadow now, born of memory and instinct. And in his place is this—this man,all at once so distinct and yet so painfully evocative of everything he remembers. He doesn’t know what to think of it, what to make of this heat suddenly rising in his cheeks at it, but he’s not given the opportunity to, because Rin is speaking again, voice quiet and full of a meaning Haruka can’t understand, only feel.

“You might not remember it, but I still remember the day I first met you.” Haruka’s not sure it’s possible at this point, but his body tenses even further, a little bit at the air which is suddenly heavy around them, but mostly because that simple sentence has opened the floodgates in his mind of the folder marked Rin and in bold red lettering do not open. That elation of a worthy adversary, the sparking electric buzz in the water he’d first and only felt when he’d shared it with Rin, young as they both were, all of it comes surging up, and his throat is suddenly tight with a million unspoken sentiments. “To be honest, it had never occurred to me that I could lose to someone.”

Haruka hides a smile into the darkness, because there it is, that flash of Rin’s past self, that childish competitiveness he could never quite grow out of—that Haruka doesn’t want him to grow out of, he’s beginning to think. That maybe it’s that bone of contention which makes them who they are—something by turns painful and exhilarating, as hard to contain as the ebb and flow of tide.

“But any frustration I felt vanished when I thought that there was someone more amazing than me, that I wanted to be able to swim like him.”

Amazing. Haruka’s breath catches on that word. He’s been called it before one too many times, and it’s caused him nothing but discomfort and the weight of frustrated expectation. But to hear Rin say it—openly, not a trace of hesitation or shyness—he repeats it over and over to himself. Amazing amazing amazing. His fists, he finds, are suddenly clenched, body coiled tight as a tripwire while he fights the urge to react, to just—turn over and respond to Rin in kind. Because who the hell is he kidding, he’s always thought Rin amazing, too, more than amazing. Like someone in the bland schema of his quotidian that doesn’t quite fit. He doesn’t know what to do, really, like always with Rin, so he settles for waiting for him to continue and hoping that the warm feeling in his chest and cheeks hasn’t spilled out to anything tangible.

“That’s why it’s hard for me when you’re not always there ahead of me, showing me what path I should take.” And, really, if Haruka had thought the air was tense before, it’s practically electric now, with Rin’s voice laving it over like running water. Anyone who isn’t—well, Haruka, would think his speech to be remarkably put-together, calm even. But it’s him and it’s Rin, and somehow they always know, with each other. And if instinct tells Haruka there’s an undercurrent to Rin’s words, there probably is.

Something in Haruka’s chest hurts with the fullness of it—his heart beats strangely and he almost thinks Rin can hear it like this. Because he’s talking, actually admitting these things out loud instead of sublimating them into tears or disproportionate anger. And if he knows to do this, then he must, must know how it’s affecting Haruka. He can’t be oblivious to the way Haruka wants to turn around and tell him to shut up, that he can’t be a guide to what he doesn’t know himself—and at the same time, he wants—

“Without you, I have nothing to aim for, you know?”

Haruka’s heart stops. He doesn’t know if Rin understands the propensity of what he’s just said. His mind blanks. And somehow, suddenly, the word anchor ceases to be just a tiresome burden to him. Before he can stop himself, the words are out.

“I remember it too. The tournament.” It’s a simple admission, maybe inadequate after all Rin’s said, but it’s all he can trust himself to say in the threshold of safe. It’s in his characteristic taciturn way, too, but somehow he doesn’t want to force the words back down, and Rin catches onto it, the rift in the ice. He turns, and for one frozen moment of horrified anticipation Haruka thinks he’s going to hug him. But he just shifts so he’s facing the ceiling, laughs softly.

“Do you remember the freestyle race we swam during the tournament this spring, when we tied and set a new tournament record together?” And again, it’s an inane question. Because it’s nigh impossible for Haruka to forget, not unless he barges into the corner of his mind reserved for precious things and obliterates the entirety of it. He doesn’t know how to begin putting this into words, but it’s simple enough to mutter out a yeah into the sheets. It’s a poor response at best, but it seems Rin reads something from his end of the silence, because he doesn’t stop talking. “I was testing you then. I wanted to see if that was really the farthest you could go.”

And really, hasn’t their relationship been so much of that, Haruka wants to ask. To push and push and push the other to—snap, he used to think, but with this Rin, this Haruka, maybe it’s like Rin has said. Go farther, be better, swim faster. He’s thinking a lot of things he hasn’t thought before, like maybe Rin’s right and he’s wrong for once, like maybe the world doesn’t exist in one dimension that is his.

“And when I sensed you coming up from behind me, I knew for sure.” The fervency in Rin’s voice is rising now, palpable in the still air around them. “That you were definitely going to enter the same world as me.”

It’s absolutely silent in the little room apart from the thud of Haruka’s heart, the blood pounding in his ears. It’s all painfully obvious to him now, that he’s been blind, ungrateful, selfish—everything else he can think to add on to that. Because Rin—Rin’s believed in him when neither of them knew it, believes in him now, and it’s about time Haruka found a little belief of his own. But all he can do is lie frozen on his side, Rin’s body burning like a furnace beside him, making him feel suddenly hot in the sharp chill of the Australian winter. Very slowly, almost imperceptibly, Rin inches closer, just the barest brush of their bodies as his voice goes very tender, soft like a whisper.

“Hey, Haru. During that race, didn’t you feel something, too?”

Rin—he doesn’t need to say it, what he’s insinuating under cover of darkness and his ambiguous wording, because if Haruka was unsure of just what this weight in the air meant before, the way his entire body thrills at their little brush of contact leaves him in no doubt now. They’ve spent so long walking circles around each other. And here Rin is coming on to him, Rin is coming on to him. And all the almosts and near misses and second-guessings—he balls his fists. There’s so much—so much.

So slow he could be measuring out each minutiae of the action, he turns around. The ceiling flashes into view, then, and he grits his teeth when he’s finally on his other side, facing Rin. This one answer, he knows, he can’t trust to words alone. Rin stiffens for a moment, and Haruka can hear his breath hitch before he, wordlessly, turns over, too, so that he’s occupying the entirety of Haruka’s field of vision, eyes dark and a wry little smile playing at his lips. Up so close, Haruka can count each of Rin’s lashes, the tiny beauty marks on his cheekbones, and he’s so preoccupied at the unexpected attractiveness that the remaining space between them vanishes unnoticed. Rin shifts even closer, Haruka leans in and—oh.

So this is emotion.

The brush of their lips is chaste, once, twice more before they come to press up against each other. It’s—Haruka’s never experienced anything like it before, but he’s pretty sure that something simple as that shouldn’t have his skin heating up where pinpricks of blood rise under the surface of it, nor make his heart feel like fight-or-flight. When they pull away, when Haruka opens his eyes—when had he shut them?—he finds Rin already looking at him with something inscrutable in his expresssion.

“What,” he mutters, averting his gaze somewhere off to the right for a split second before Rin’s hands cups his chin and guides him back into the deadlock of their gazes.

“That’s your answer?” he sounds suddenly as quietly fervent as he had done before, gaze burning into Haruka—and he isn’t going to back down from this now. There’s no panic, no misgiving—just this muted sort of quiet heat charging the atmosphere. And he knows this to be a sure thing simply because it’s not a sure thing. The world knew it when they were two immature, stubborn idiots—but the sweetness of it now that it’s seasoned with maturity, makes up for lost time, Haruka thinks. So he looks Rin right back in the eye, seals his fate.

“That’s my answer.”

For a minute, Rin just stares at him like—like he’s never seen him before. But before Haruka can look away again, he’s surging forward, grip on his chin tightening as he presses their lips together again, this time with more intention. Haruka’s head is rapidly fogging up as he wonders whether it’s something Australian, something he’s learnt to do here—but then his mouth opens in a gasp and Rin’s licking inside it and he decides it doesn’t matter. Nothing could be truer, more right in this moment and he lets himself be swept along, free hand finding its way into Rin’s hair, tugging a bit to elicit a low mmm into his mouth—there’s so much heat between them now, Rin always burns a little hot anyway but Haruka knows it’s not just him right now, his own body responding in kind to Rin’s pull.

They’re both breathing hard when they pull away this time, and Haruka finds his gaze dropping to Rin’s lips, glistening and just a little bit redder than usual. It sends a shiver down his spine, and, like in a daze, he makes to claim them again before Rin stops him with a hand stroking along his face.

“Haru,” he says, almost pained. “If you don’t stop now—I don’t know where this’ll go.”

Haruka sucks in a breath. He hadn’t considered—hadn’t ever thought that they could do that.Stupid of him in retrospect, buttwo guys—or with anyone for that matter, it’s weird no matter how you look at it for him, at least. But this isn’t—it’s Rin. And somehow, the idea of it with Rin, when he thinks of it, is just—not disgusting or abhorrent or anything but natural. The decision, it comes to him in a blinding flash, isn’t one he has to make right here. It’s one he’d made a long, long time ago. Because really, there’s only ever one person in the world who’s shown him that sight he’d never seen before. And only ever one person he’s wanted to see it with.

“Rin—,” he begins, then stops short. Words, for him, are immaterial. And there’s no way in hell he’ll ever find enough to say all of this. So he just acts. Throws caution to the winds. Ignores Rin’s warning hand on his cheek and seeks out his lips, parting them with his own. The slick slide of their tongues together makes— noises which send Haruka’s pulse thrumming under his skin, his breathing choppy and fragmented. It’s like that for a long moment, Rin slowly melting under the contact—and then Haruka’s on his back, looking up into Rin’s burning eyes, Rin’s jaw clenched tight, arms effectively caging him in.

“Don’t fucking blame me if you can’t walk tomorrow, Haru.”

Haruka is hard-pressed to repress the shudder than goes through him at Rin’s words, at the way Rin says his name, low and dangerous. But he raises an eyebrow at him, knows that something inside Rin will rise to the challenge—and he’s right. He’s so, so right when all he can do is get out a surprised interjection as he’s pressed into the mattress before Rin is kissing him, kissing him like he’s hungry for it while he ruts his hips down into Haruka’s once, experimentally. And Haruka’s been aware of—that in the background all this while, but with the hard ridge of Rin’s arousal pressing up into his own now, he’s aware of it, and suddenly, it’s like he can’t stop. He can’t stop himself from moaning, and he can’t stop his hips from twitching back up against the friction. Rin smirks—he can feel him doing it into the kiss, and he channels his irritation into retribution. Buries his hands into Rin’s hair and pulls hard, rocks his hips up again just to hear Rin stifle a groan.

“Don’t play dirty,” Rin grits out, ever the hypocrite, and Haruka open his mouth to tell him just that, but then Rin’s hand finds its way under the drawstring of his sweats and all that comes out is a low hiss. It’s a bit dry, the friction, but Haruka’s hips buck up into it nonetheless—and when Rin removes his hand to lick over it, the blood rushes to his head so fast it makes him dizzy. He’s thankful he’s lying down like he’s never been thankful for anything else before, especially when Rin’s hand returns to stroking him and he joins their mouths again to keep in the embarrassing noises he’s making.

“Feels good?” It would be a sympathetic question except for the way Rin murmurs it into his ear, voice honeyed and dripping seduction like heknows.And Haruka’s reached his breaking point.

“Bastard…,” he grits out, blindly reaching for the waistband of Rin’s own pants and grasping the fullness of his cock from under it. And it’s worth the effort for the way the pace of Rin’s hand falters on his own cock, the way his head slumps down on the pillow next to him as he groans.

“Haru—,” he kisses at his neck, slides his other hand up under his t-shirt to thumb at his nipples, making his back arch. “You don’t have to.”

Haruka rolls his eyes even though he knows Rin can’t see, and speeds up the movements of his hand, moistening it with the precome that is steadily leaking from the tip, spreading it around. “You were saying?”

“Fuck,” Rin moans out, biting down on the soft skin at the juncture of Haruka’s neck and shoulder in retaliation, sending a spark of electricity to the heat pooling in his belly. “You’re so unfair.”

“I’m unfair?” Haruka can’t fight the heat in his voice anymore, any attempts at a mild intonation thrown out the window as he twists his wrist on the upstroke to watch Rin’s entire body shudder as he stills Haruka’s hand with a bruising grip on his wrist after he does it again.

“Enough.”

Can’t take more? Haruka wants to ask, wants to set the smoldering embers in Rin’s eyes ablaze, but then Rin is pulling Haruka’s shirt over his head, then his own, and looking at his body in a way that makes him feel even barer than he is. Down his eyes travel like a caress, making Haruka’s skin heat under the phantom touch—and it’s worse when he rejoins the trail of his gaze with his lips, kissing lower, lower, mouth and tongue working at his nipples as he slides his pants down over the jut of his hips, his cock, until he’s completely exposed. Rin kicks the blanket off of them, and Haruka can’t even find it in himself to care at the cold air because Rin’s on him, Rin’s going to be inside him, and Rin chooses that moment to graze his teeth over a pebbled nipple and all he can think of is the heat of his body and his mouth. He’s moaning, must have been, because there’s no resistance when Rin’s fingers nudge at the seam of his mouth. He sucks them in on instinct, tongue flicking over them in ways he didn’t even know he was capable of, and Rin makes a low noise into his skin, trailing his hand down from where it had been caressing Haruka’s side to push his legs apart.

“I’m gonna fuck you now, Haru.” The words are deceptively gentle, belied only by Rin’s fingers digging bruises into the inside of his thigh—and yet they pour into Haruka’s insides like something molten, burning him from the inside out. All he can do is nod, then, as fervent as Rin ever was, and he’s only given till that little movement before Rin’s fingers are gone from his mouth, only to push at his entrance as Rin lifts himself back up so that their noses are brushing, scrutinizing Haruka’s face. It’s such a foreign sensation that it forces a gasp past his lips despite himself, skin prickling into goosebumps. When Rin slides one long, callused finger into him, Haruka can’t help another catch in his breath, the flutter of his lashes. It’s weird—doesn’t feel like anything he’s ever felt before, but the anticipation laden in it has him pressing down tight against the breach. Rin makes an almost frustrated sound, licking at the shell of Haruka’s ear before breathing into it. “You’re tight, so fucking—I need you to relax a bit for me.”

Rin’s finger jostles a tiny bit as he trails sucking kisses, excruciatingly slow, across Haruka’s throat, and Haruka makes a soft noise lost somewhere between the shudder wracking his body and Rin’s lips as he silences him with the heat of his mouth and the press of his tongue. His other hand, rubbing soothing circles over his thigh, suddenly grips hard, hard enough to hurt as he moves his finger with intent, curls it a bit and—

“Ahhh—!” Heat jolts up Haruka’s spine as he throws his head back, breaking the kiss to make a sound that seems obscenely loud in the still air of the room. Rin’s looking at him with a kind of dark focus which is almost frightening in its intensity as he does it again, and Haruka’s entire body jerks.

“Here?” And damn him, he knows, even with Haruka’s lack of response, as he adds another finger, driving it straight into that spot which makes his vision short out. Haruka’s so—he’s slowly going insane with the assault on his senses, and he needs—he needs more. All of it. He can’t think, can’t judge what is safe to be said anymore. So when Rin scissors his fingers, he forces his eyes open, doesn’t hold back the broken keen that’s straining against the confines of his throat.

“Please, Rin.”

The reaction is instantaneous. The movement of Rin’s fingers inside him stills completely for a second before he drives back in with a force that sends Haruka sliding back a little. He’s another finger in, then, biting hard at Haruka’s clavicle, muttering out nonsense against the forming bruise. “Yeah, Haru, just let me—let me—”

It’s all a dizzying blur to Haruka now, a fever dream—Rin’s mouth has found its way back to his nipples as he moves his fingers faster, faster—the slick sounds echoing through the room, a background track that’s only feeding the flames licking at the base of his spine. And then it’s all gone, the stretch of Rin’s fingers giving way to an aching emptiness and a blunt pressure at his entrance—and this is it. Haruka holds his breath as Rin raises his head to look him in the eye, something unspoken and yet more concrete than anything he could ever voice passing its silent way between them as Rin presses his hips forward, because this is it. All of Rin.

Haruka bites his lip as he fights to keep his eyes from fluttering shut, but something soft and wrecked trembles out of him all the same at the burning stretch as Rin sheathes himself fully inside of him. He’s breathing hard and his jaw is set with the restraint of it as he waits for Haruka to adjust for a long, agonizing moment before he speaks, voice shaking. “Fuck, Haru—please, can I move?”

Haruka’s whole body is drawn taut, and he knows it’s not going to take long for him to break like this, where he can feel the reverberations of each throb of Rin’s pulse where they’re joined—but the prospect doesn’t scare him. Not anymore. And so he lets his arms snake around Rin’s back, nails digging in as he braces himself. “Yes. Rin, yes.”

Rin fucks like he swims—deliberate, brutal, completely single-minded. It doesn’t take them long to find a rhythm, the driving of Rin’s cock into Haruka harder and harder after the first few tentative thrusts, like he’s looking for Haruka’s limit and isn’t afraid to push it. Haruka is torn between clenching his eyes shut against the onslaught of sensation and just—watching Rin’s tether fray and snap, licking up the droplets of sweat beading on his skin, but he’s not given the space to think about it, the low groans Rin makes every time Haruka tightens around him and the constant friction of his thrusts crowding out everything else. He’s left to drag his nails down Rin’s back at the little moans punched out of him at every snap of his hips, tears forming at the corners of his eyes when it gets too much. And Rin is still looking straight at him, eyes fogged up with arousal. Even as he hitches one of Haruka’s legs up over his shoulder to bend him double, even as Haruka cries out from how good it is, his gaze never wavers. It’d make Haruka uncomfortable if he didn’t know exactly what it is—how absolutely beautiful Rin looks to him right now, too.

“Ah, Rin, Rin, Rin—,” he chants, he knows he’s moaning nonsense syllables, but it’s all subconscious at this point—he’s saying all he’s thinking, and all he’s thinking is that the boy above him is beautiful—that he wants more of him, more of that delicious pleasure gathering in the pit of his stomach every time the pressure splitting him open brushes up against that spot. Rin groans long and low into Haruka’s ear at it, hips stuttering.

“Haru—fuck, don’t—don’t just say my name like that, shit—,” he gets out between thrusts, swiveling his hips in a way that makes Haruka’s back arch right up off the bed—buries his face in Haruka’s neck, sucking a dark-edged bruise into the hollow of his throat, drinking in the choked-off moan that reverberates within it before he pulls back, eyes feverish and pinning the other down more effectively than if he’s used brute force. “Or I don’t know what I’ll do.”

And really, who ever said that it was only Rin who could test Haruka?

“What’ll you—ah—do?” Haruka matches his gaze with his own, unflinching, lets the heat thrumming in his body show on his face as he bucks his hips up to meet Rin thrust for thrust. “Show me, Rin.”

He lets his voice linger over the last syllable, drawing it out and tasting it on his tongue like something sweet—and it’s almost tangible, clear as shattering glass as the last of Rin’s restraint—and sanity therewith—snaps, slips through his fingers like running sand. A low growl is his only warning before Rin pulls out, almost all the way, and snaps his hips back in. Deep. Haruka can barely think to comprehend how loud his answering moan is, before Rin does it again. It’s painful, almost, how deep he can get like this, and the knife-edge of it somewhere on the wrong side of pleasurable makes him dig his nails into Rin’s skin, hiss out a more into his ear. And Rin gives. Again and again, that same brutal pace at the same unforgiving angle, and Haruka thinks he’ll go insane from how rapidly he’s hurtling towards the edge. He just needs—the friction of his cock against Rin’s stomach is nothing short of frustrating, and the thought of getting a hand between them has barely crossed his mind before Rin’s beaten him to it, fingers wrapping around his cock and bringing him off in fast, sloppy jerks.

“Ngh—touch… me—,” Haruka’s voice is leaving him before he’s had the opportunity to filter his thoughts, judgement gone and lying shattered somewhere on the outer edge of his shorted-out mind. It’s all inconsequential right now—the only thing that matters is the pulsing heat driving into him, the coil tightening in his belly—and Rin. He knows his body’s tensing up, can feel how hard he’s clenching down in the pitch and depth of Rin’s moans, like he can feel every single throb of him inside himself. Last spurt, headlong race towards the finish, Rin moves his hand once, twice more, swipes his thumb over the head and that’s it. “—Rin!”

He’s coming for what feels like an eternity, vision going white for a split second, intensifying when he feels scorching heat spilling into him. He’ll be forever glad it was too much—that he didn’t hear the sounds he made, the sounds that had Rin yanking him close as he could get and sinking his teeth into his shoulder. It’s harder than he’s ever come before, more than he ever thought he could feel. It’s drawn out, agonizingly almost, with each aborted jerk of Rin’s hips until the euphoria ebbs. He opens his eyes slowly, shudders at the aftershock when Rin pulls out, spent cock dragging against his abused inner walls. There’s come inside him, there’s come on his stomach, and it should make him want to run for a washcloth—but when Rin collapses next to him, face up, eyes radiating a warmth that’s so Rinand yet somehow different now, he wants nothing more than to stay. It’s not going to be a relationship of I love yousand grand romantic gestures—from Haruka’s side, at least of that he’s certain, and he can’t promise Rin—well, anything. Not stability or a dream or even a home to come back to. But this—this, as he retrieves the blanket, not bothering with their clothes, and curls up into Rin’s side—this, he can promise. Staying—being by Rin’s side no matter what he does and where he goes, he can swear to.

He can do that.

#free!#free! iwatobi swim club #haru #nanase haruka #matsuoka rin #rin #haruka #rinharu #harurin #rinharu fanfiction #smut #harurin fanfiction #honeymoon #free! eternal summer #fanfiction #friends to lovers

18 notes · View notes

tsumex · 5 years

Text

Help me up these steps to ruin-- sugakookie (chapter 1)

It's like a ghost neither of them can shake-- that tells them how much they love each other when they're apart, how much they hate each other when they're together.

Step one, tell me what have I done

The first thing which Jungkook notices about him are his collarbones—so fragile, they almost make dragging himself to class worth it. He doesn't know his name, of fucking course he doesn't—had missed that piece of information somewhere in between the buzzing in his head and the throbbing behind his eyes. But as he—italicized he—scribbles notes in a stocky, blunt hand across the whiteboard, Jungkook pays him more attention than he's paid anyone in a long while. Pictures the slow seep of ink into skin and finds himself idly wondering at the bleed-out of kiss marks just so on the curve of his neck.

And maybe that should be enough in itself—the first premonition in and of the observation that this ridiculously unassuming professor can talk so huge and gesture so expansive—even as he looks to Jungkook nothing more durable than a porcelain doll. It puzzles him, yes. It sends a sharp shard of contempt bolting through him, even. And it should scare him, too, something tells him much later when—irony notwithstanding—every goddamn allegorical implication of that slow, poisonous waltz drives home to him in the rhythm of the iambic pentameter.

For now, though, it doesn't bother him. In fact, he's relegated the classroom to a tiny corner of his mind even as his gaze flickers over the cut of his sweater, fixating on the hollows of the clavicle, then the bone itself, winging away from the sternum like a wish— thrown into sharp relief whenever his arm moves a way.

Jungkook tilts his head up a bit. If he pretends hard enough, there's a breeze hitting his face, and the varnished wood and plastic morphs into the texture and feel of rough-hewn grass. He's sure what the guy's saying is interesting enough, but words just glance off him like hailstones in a storm even as he knows that he’ll think about it later. Maybe run some strange mix of rueful and frustrated when he sprawls, half awake, in the blinding white of sun hitched high on the sky— with no background track to when he tries to quantify that esoteric aesthetic of him in the confines of black and white, of charcoal against paper.

But he goes to class again.

What does he sound like? It’s something of idle curiosity after so many lectures filling in the colors with grey and slashes of pencil in the spaces between— it’s something of the sterility of his room pressing in on him one day where the blankness of the walls suddenly grows hands and teeth. It’s something of his only brush with humanity— him not wanting it be ghosting past his flatmate with the interaction of muttered, half-heard greetings and stilted pauses in a layer of ice an inch thick.

And that last sends a buzz sparking electric under his skin— there’s little he knows about Kim Taehyung apart from his name and that his parents had found him an eligible rent-sharer— and the silences are of his own volition. Which truth makes days like this even more unbearable, because things aren’t supposed to be like this.

He isn’t supposed to need.

He trudges his way onto university grounds with the itch of it sewn to him like a garment and sets his jaw against the utter onslaught of humanity milling around. It takes almost more than he has to make his way to the classroom, to take the third seat from the left corner which some cognitive distortion has led him to perceive as somewhat safer than the two hundred-odd identical ones populating the expanse of the room. Like always, there’s a radius around him, students keeping a careful distance from what they know now to be his utter taciturnity.

It’s uncomfortable to think of why that just sets the ache in the pit of his stomach to throbbing today, so he doesn’t.

He breezes in just as the bell rings, brandishing a worn copy of Shakespearean tragedies, and Jungkook's gaze catches on him like fabric on the stray edge of a corner. It's nothing substantial—Jungkook can't describe what he's thinking when his eyes lock on a particularly riveting angle the slender curve of his waist makes when he's turning. Or the insistent, childlike tug at him to commit to memory and to paper the way his lashes flutter feather-soft when Jungkook can tell he's tired.

It's not a good day—Jungkook can already feel himself slipping away. Something inside him laughs at the paradox even as Jungkook's mouth crowds with the bitter of it. So much, it crows in triumph, so much for his voice.

So much for people.

It's all an impossibly skewed equation— the sterility in his head a haven at best and unendurable at worst—and even with that bipolarity, he'd never trade the familiarity of it for the dubious nature of social interaction. And there's a word he's thinking of, shying away from thinking of, but there it is, bold blood red in his mind.

Couldn't.

So he'll deal with the misery of it—thankful that it's just a persistent, dull ache today, because the humiliation and the uncertainty that people warrant hurts so much sharper. And fuck actually listening, trying to piece together the sound of his voice—the class is starting to melt, the hum of muttered conversation and voices talking, talking, talking starting to press in on him. It takes him right back to hours upon hours of endless, pointless conversations logged on fee registers, of people saying things and saying things and saying things until he could scream at the banality of it all.

To help him, they said, before—

He cuts off that train of thought in a violent shake of his head. It'd be just opening the floodgates—and he's neither prepared nor willing.

So he heaves himself away, willing himself to focus on the professor, that calm place inside his head where he so often finds himself when he has nowhere else to go—and notices for the first time that the class is eerily silent. He raises his head, then, and startles. He— the professor whose stills Jungkook wants to put on a minimalist frame and hang up in his room, is glaring directly at him.

"Honored to have you join us—?"

It takes a moment for Jungkook to register that he's phrased the end of his sentence like a question, marveling as he is at the sound of his voice, just that end of hoarse, rough like a cat stroked the wrong way. When he does, though, it's a testament to how far out of it he is that he has to cast about for the words.

"—Jungkook. Jeon Jungkook." Even as he's embarrassingly glad for not tripping over his words as he—tiredness aching—pushes himself to his feet, the professor raises an eyebrow at his lack of honorific.

"Well, Jeon-ssi, since you obviously know nothing about Hamlet, and, as is evident by your lack of attention during class, have no desire to learn, either, maybe you should do everyone a favor and search for a class more suited to your interests, yeah?"

Jungkook feels his fists balling even as he fights back the word vomit that's clawing its way up his throat— and, fuck, it's no good, his thoughts overdriving as his mouth seems to open in a decelerated haze.

"Hamlet is one of Shakespeare's three great tragedies, written in his characteristic Iambic Pentameter, with Macbeth and Othello being the others. It is the story of the prince of Denmark, and the fatal flaw of the protagonist—a feature in each of his tragedies which causes the downfall of the hero—was indecision, as characterized by his famous 'to be or not to be' speech, where he's contemplating suicide."

As he finishes, with his heart racing and his breath shorting out, he immediately decides that the look on the professor's face has made it all worthwhile.

"Good enough, gyosu?"

And shooting him a saccharine smile, he gathers up his possessions and walks out.

When he lays in bed later, with the discomfort of it churning in his gut and his bedside lamp bleeding the colors from the darkening sky, dyeing his walls a clinical, ugly white, he thinks about why. How. What it was that had possessed him to answer like that instead of just removing himself from the situation like he'd always done.

And that admission rises in his throat like an entreaty before he quashes it down—that it'd been invigorating, that he'd

enjoyed it

And he focuses instead on the voice he's finally paid attention to, like the crackling of wooden embers—like cynicism and coffee and maybe a room that isn't like Jungkook's. And somehow complimenting all the jagged edges of his person and the subdued pastels he likes to wear.

Jungkook closes his eyes, and— for the first time in a long while, he doesn't know what to think. Only a bad feeling—about that professor and how he seemed just a little too beautiful to be true, and clamoring misgivings he couldn't put a name to.

—characterized by intense negative feelings, like those of worthlessness and guilt—

Jungkook rolls over, the ache manifesting into a deep, intrinsic throbbing again. He doesn't know why those words—cold, impersonal, Wikipedia-ed by a sixteen-year old upon first diagnosis—come to haunt him now.

—have no dreams or aspirations—

—always alone—

He pulls the comforter—white—over his head and screws his eyes shut, not bothering to turn the lamp off.

Sleeping takes many, many breathing exercises.

It takes Jungkook about two days to figure out that he's fucking ruined himself.

His days are empty in a way they never used to be—not that he's doing anything different. There's always the same mix of his music—long Chopins and Beethoven sonatas, brooding, eclectic neo-classicals from all over the world—that permeate the blackest of his moods, every sorrow and hope and every last misgiving, lending something liquid to his hands as they work. There's always work—so many rough edges and pointed corners he soothes at with a charcoal 2B, books upon books overflowing, pages upon pages stacked away from the world's incisive gaze. And his books—his old Dante anthologies and Hemingways—with their words of well-thumbed comfort.

And yet somehow, he can't imagine color into his walls like the familiarity of the notes always conjured up for him, and he can't draw from his well of inspiration. Not after realizing that the entirety of his sketchbook is scribbled over with likenesses of fragile wrists and slender fingers, clavicles and waists in varying degrees of completion.

But it's reading that is the worst of it—literature for him turns into a sort of séance when it takes the shape and form of a rough-edged voice and expression through gesture.

So yeah, nothing is different except that everything is, and he wonders at it when he's not angry with that one fucking touch of interaction for poisoning his entire, reclusive life. Most nights he goes out, downs drinks at one of the more classy clubs his side of town and tries to pretend like the rhythm of bass and swaying bodies can drown out the dull pounding in his ears. Like the richness of the bodies he brings to the discrete rooms at the back can fill up that void which has clung to him ever since he'd found out that hearts were meant for more than beating, that whatever it was, that word enough, he'd never be it.

And if he does manage to forget it, even for a moment, the cold comfort of his staring walls when he comes home, the long-dead cell phone, the fourth-choice university, are all infallible reminders.

When Jungkook's alarm rings, obscenely early, it takes him a moment to figure out exactly why he's awake at this unholy hour. And somehow, the answer—8 am english lit class—does nothing to allay his general unpleasant mood. A quick glance at the window tells him that the sun is just beginning its pink ascent over the horizon, and he takes a moment to consider his options.

One, and the much more appealing one, would be to just go back to sleep—no uni, no problem. For a moment, Jungkook's lids begin to grow heavy as he leans into the prospect like a warm embrace. The only thing that stops him from succumbing is the consequent prospect, that repugnant one, of another day of frustration, of curling into himself and staring at walls that seem to do it right back. Of time creeping into all the nooks and crevices of the ways he tries desperately to fill it, like an immense, daunting wall.

And for no better reason than that the thought of it sends a shudder through him, he jerks the comforter back, shakes his head as if it'll do anything to get rid of the acrid aftertaste, and ventures to the bathroom.

There's a thick knot of panic—for the lack of a better term—in the pit of Jungkook's stomach some thirty minutes later. Nothing's gone south yet, no sign to suggest that his stupid gamble might end badly—he's even managed to have a half-decent conversation with Taehyung after bumping into him in their shared kitchenette while trying to get himself adequately caffeinated (going to class?— yes—which one?— english— cool, see you—sure). But something tells him that his precious signage will only bear the stamp of superstition as far as today is concerned.

A name, he tells himself, chest twisting uncomfortably as he drives through the university gates, scans his ID, picturing them clanging shut behind him—sealing his fate. All he wants from today is a name—to put a name to that—which eludes him, who fascinates him with all his inconsistencies, the sharp contrasts translating so well into art, yet with so much of the beauty lost in translation. He wants to go to class, maybe for no better reason than to see what will happen.

He takes a quick look in his windshield mirror to ensure that none of this increasingly frantic train of thought has transuded onto his face. He looks a little dazed, a little mussed around the edges, but his expression—blank—has always been good at hiding his thoughts. And he hopes and prays to all hell that it'll stand him in good stead today.

Winter in Korea has always been Jungkook's favorite. Whether it's the short, brilliant frost with a million icy needles growing along the edges of fences and cars, or the quiet, rare snow—or even the chilly gusts that make you glad to be warm—in winter, Jungkook thinks, you don't have to feel if you don't want to.

He's glad of the sweater now, large on him and black like most everything he owns, which serves well to hide his sweating palms and shaking hands as he settles into his seat, head down, waiting in a sort of terrible anticipation as the class around him fills up. Although he's never really cared, he can't tell now if it's just his imagination or if he's really the subject of curious stares this time around.

In the two excruciating minutes that pass between the going of the bell and the arrival of the professor, Jungkook visualizes a thousand possibilities, each more discomfiting than the last. He's just about ready to balk when that escape route is cut off by the professor, clutching a mug of coffee—black—in one hand, and the same damn Shakespeare in the other, overflowing with sheets of paper haphazardly crammed in between the pages. Jungkook can't stop his lips from twitching, though his amusement quickly dies away when he starts taking roll call, replaced by a bolt of pure flight instinct. He grips the hem of his sleeves so tight his nails dig into his palms, even through the wool, to keep himself anchored.

"Jeon Jungkook."

When he arrives at his name, Jungkook's heart is thudding so hard in his ears that he can barely hear him—but he has to answer, he knows it, or there would have been no point to his excruciation. So he unsticks his throat and wills his voice not to quaver.

"Present."

He fights to keep his face expressionless as he chances a glance at the professor—and finds him looking right at himself with an unreadable expression on his face. There's a long silence, just that exchange of gazes, before the professor breaks the stalemate and calls the next name. There's no combination of words in the dictionary—English or Korean—that Jungkook can string together to describe his abject relief at it. He feels light before he quashes the feeling, and looks over the professor to rid himself of the embarrassment of having let it bother him so much in the first place.

Jungkook hadn't realized how much he's missed it—this, the professor's morning voice rubbing rough and exposed over coffee as he explains antitheses in blank verse—however brief a taste he'd had of it. He makes an honest-to-god attempt to follow, he does—but it is, for the most part, just a reiteration of what he'd already done back in school. And with a lack of more engaging stimuli, his mind keeps shunting off to how the professor's thin, white sweater clings to the sharpness of his shoulder blades, the outline so delicate in itself. Before he knows it, he's got it down in a few pencil strokes on a page of his notebook, and it's sweeter than even in his imagination.

Because it's the real thing, now, playing a background track to where he's shading in the hollows, lightening, crosshatching—running life through its penciled-in veins and putting dimension to its planeness, and he feels a sense of overwhelming calm as he sketches.

"Jeon Jungkook."

Jungkook freezes, serenity shattering like a trainwreck. There's only one person in this world who calls him by his full name, and that's his mother when she's mad, a few hundred kilometers away. So even if he didn't know with acute distinction that voice, it could only be one person who is drawling out his name from right behind him.

His neck seems frozen in place and only when—an eternity later—he's confident that he's successfully schooled his expression of blind panic into something resembling apathy, does he turn. The professor's glare is, although unease-inducing, expected.

What he's not expecting, though, is for him to forgo the verbal tirade Jungkook was sure was coming, instead sighing before walking back to the podium.

"See me after class."

The next forty-five minutes are easily the most uncomfortable of Jungkook's life. He's paying no more attention than he did before, mentally slapping his hand away from wandering to his pencil as he shifts in his seat, making scenarios in his head that get more pessimistic by the minute. He'd almost rather the professor had actually yelled and kicked him out than forcing him into this impasse as it exists now. He wonders what the professor had seen, whether he'd caught onto the fact that there was no other muse to it but him.

And how he'll react.

A cold sweat is dripping down his back by now, hands and fingers shocked to the point of numbness. His happy place eludes him, only seeming more and more remote the more he tries to retreat into it. To quell the paranoia that is digging its claws into him like an illness, he counts. Counts the number of chairs, the number of students, the guys and the girls.

If there are more guys than girls, everything will be fine.

He ends up with a hundred guys and a hundred and thirteen girls.

Somehow, the time passes. Slowly, surely, the minutes tick by on their roster, and Jungkook doesn't know whether he's dreading or anticipating the bell when it rings. Either way, there's a tightness in the pit of his stomach—because while he knows that the professor won't pull any punches as far as humiliating him is concerned, it's his first time getting to see him up close and maybe putting a name to all the artwork that lies dormant within the confines of so many stray pages.

He dawdles in the general vicinity of professor's table, waiting for the class to empty out, fixing his gaze upon a scratch on the shiny surface of it to avoid the glances the other students shoot him. It seems to him that the students leave, alternately, maddeningly slow or way too fast for Jungkook to prepare himself for the verbal battery.

Finally, though, they're the only ones left, and Jungkook lifts his gaze to the professor, hands shoved deep in his pockets to hide the shaking.

"Gyosu-nim, you—"

"Asked you to stay back, yes." To Jungkook's great unsettlement, he wasn't glaring—just looking at him with that same unreadable look from roll call. "Couldn't have you calling me out in front of the whole class again."

Here he gives a half-smile and beckons Jungkook—who is getting more confused by the minute— to the front of his desk.

"Look, Jungkook. You're a talented kid. I've seen you sketch, and you're not totally incompetent with English. But I'm telling you now—if the reason you're attending this class is not the love for English alone, then change courses right now."

"I love English, seonsaeng-nim." Jungkook says, fighting to keep his voice level— though whether the threat is from the insinuation, or just the sheer nerve of this guy, he’s hard-pressed to discern.

“But that’s not your reason for attending my class,” the professor states flatly. “There hasn’t been one lecture when my teaching has had your attention. I doubt you even know my name.”

And fuck him, but he’s right. On all counts. Even now, Jungkook has to fight to separate his words from the cupid’s-bow mouth that says them— lips chapped from the cold and the unnatural pink of spilled pastel ink. Up this close, his skin is so, so pale, almost translucent, so that Jungkook swears he can see the bruised purple-blue veins running just underneath.

He knows he's staring, gaze locked with the professor's, his quirked eyebrow daring Jungkook to contradict him. But all he can see are the smudges under his eyes, like someone was careless with a soft pastel stick, the little beauty mark just at the juncture of his neck and shoulder—just little details he longs to pencil in, treasure and keep. He tries, nevertheless, his best attempt at feigning sincerity, quickly glancing down at the papers scattered across the table in front of him.

"I do know your name—," he scans the documents for something close to one, but the professor interrupts before he can volunteer anything plausible.

"Save it. You're a hundred years too early to be trying to fool me, so don't even bother trying."

Jungkook's hands ball up into fists. He barely has time to shudder at the déjà vu, or consider that this is the second time in the span of a week that the guy has provoked this reaction, before the words are out of his mouth.

"So what do you want, gyosu?"

The professor frowns, maybe at the impertinence of the question itself, maybe at the intentional dropping of the –nim, and pinches the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. And while Jungkook kind of really wants to punch him in the face, he wants also to take those slender fingers into his own and examine for himself their delicacy.

"I want you to not half-ass my class. Think whatever the hell you want to, but in my class, you're a goddamn student. I want you to drop that holier-than-thou attitude and pay some attention, because as you are now, you're not only being a shitty student, but also insulting the hell out of English Lit. And I don't hold with people insulting the things I love. So shape up, or ship out."

If it were anyone else, Jungkook would have ended the conversation there. Walked out with a yes, seonsaeng-nim and never attended again. But it's this guy, this man in front of him who somehow always knows what buttons to push to provoke Jungkook in the worst way possible. So, riding the crest of that wave of aggression which had led them here in the first place, Jungkook glares right back.

"It's not my fault that half the stuff you teach is basic high school knowledge."

The professor flushes, the eyebrow raise threatening to merge with his hairline, and Jungkook knows he's hit a nerve. And however the ramifications of that might come to haunt him later, he is, in the moment, completely unapologetic.

"Oh, really? Which is this magical high school you went to, then? Maybe we should all go there and get a head start on English."

"Busan Science School."

The words are out before he knows it, dropped like the echoing clang of a bell into a long, tense silence—and he can feel the same question he's fielded time and again in the aftershocks.

W hy?

Why leave Busan ?

Why this third-rate anonymous university after your academic record?

He's expecting all of it again—that and more, laced with the venom the professor is so proficient at dispensing. But—to Jungkook's abject shock—the scowl melts off his face, and he catches a fleeting glimpse of something inscrutable before it is replaced by a quirk of his mouth.

"Well then, you'll just have to show me what you've got, Jeon Jungkook. What is the famous first line of Pride and Prejudice?"

Jungkook barely has time to register the mercurial mood-shift before he's responding automatically. "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." Adding, "That was easy."

The professor smiles, the first real smile Jungkook has seen on him, and there's something just beautiful in the way it makes his eyes crinkle, the laugh lines deepen on his smooth, unblemished skin. Just a flash of it, but it makes something squeeze in Jungkook's chest. Just a flash, and they're on to the next question.

"Written by?"

"Jane Austen."

"Quote Milton."

"Better to reign in hell, than to serve in heaven."

"Favorite Frost poem?"

"Fire and Ice."

"Virginia Woolf's famous writing style is called?"

"Stream of consciousness."

They're both—well, smiling now, Jungkook's facial muscles feeling tight with disuse. It's a strange feeling, sure, because whatever he'd expected from this, it hadn't been to end up smiling across the table at this guy, being struck dumb by how he looks even prettier up close, torn between wanting to capture it on paper—even though he knows that the pasty white gradient can never compare to the luminousness of his skin, the two dimensions never catch the life he seems to exude—and just drinking it in.

This sense of camaraderie he wants to bottle up and store, too, like a firefly jar for the inevitable second-guessing he knows will follow as soon as he steps foot back into his sterile haven. He's subconsciously putting it off, the minute analysis of every little bit of today even with the knowledge that it's the only remedy to the discomfort coiling in his gut. It's been a while, he justifies, and more than anything, he wants—

He stoppers the train of thought there. Wants turn into needs turn into hurt.

It's a conscious effort, but he brings himself back to the present from where he's drifted far away, forces himself to tune into what the professor is saying.

"You're a good kid," he's talking to Jungkook as he gathers his papers up, who tries not to stare too obviously as he commits to memory how every action is somehow graceful while seeming purely accidental. "Just try and attend. We do move past the high school level, I promise you."

They walk out together, with a strange sense of exhaustion seeping into Jungkook's bones with every step he takes. The thought of dealing with the rest of his classes makes his stomach turn, threatening to void itself of the coffee he'd drunk earlier—a danger he knows will materialize if ignored. The same, indecipherable expression crosses the professor's face when they part ways with Jungkook making a beeline for the carpark, but he says nothing.

It's only when he's walked ten steps in the direction of the parking that he hears the professor calling after him.

"Jeon Jungkook!"

Jungkook turns, to see him flash another of those quick, dazzling smiles.

"It's Yoongi. Min Yoongi."

2 notes · View notes