CLOSED | ❝i used to be...❞

[freed]

Who: jawdacity + freed
When: (during the effects of the event) 2/13
Where: gardens
What: if you don't remember someone, they're not exactly real...are they? aka with rin forgetting all cardinal things relevant to his dreams, haru finds himself having disappeared in more ways than one.
Rating/Warning: none

[ once, haru ran looking for rin, desperation digging its fingernails into his blood and pulse like warning signs as he raised his voice -- a rare, unnatural thing for a nanase -- and asked for the first time for rin matsuoka to answer him. not the other way around. it seems ages ago (though it wasn't) and when haru goes over his own time in tellus it is a little bit longer but does not explain one of rin's last messages.

you fighting again?

again? if he wracks his brain, if he stops moving entirely, if he empties the whole of his thought process, nothing creeps in, nothing comes. again? what does that mean? he would remember if he had fought with makoto; he would remember something like the last couple of weeks: the apartment they have been sharing a ghost-town for how often the two are there, together or apart -- mostly apart. habits fast formed have started to rot, crack down the middle and disappear: no more meeting after work, not even waiting after school, no deciding on meals together, no seemingly superfluous notes jotted just to say pool later as if makoto wouldn't already know. unbeknownst to haru, makoto does check on him at night but what haru doesn't know, he cannot factor in. he hates it, hates how the few times he has spoken to makoto tachibana lately it is as if the other boy speaks around him, how the intuitive leaps created and made permanent over the years are just...gone. makoto feels like a stranger.

haru wonders if all fights are like this and then again: what do you mean?

scanning the dotted crowds, dispersing and moving unimportantly, haru looks for the familiar flash of red. he needs an explanation for that question; he also just needs to see rin, really see him.

when both rin and kisumi had gone, haru did his best to not panic in the way haru has always done his best to not do things -- by toning down alarm and committing to everydayness. ordinariness. in his worst moments, sleepless and wandering stranger parts of tellus, he ran his hands along the edges of buildings, exhaled against the glass of windows, let people bump into him just to feel something was really happening. all the while, he wondered with an underwater quietness: what happened to you? he would drag himself on unreliable legs back to the apartment, finally collapsing into a faulty dormancy. one of those nights he woke from with a cold and a fever so high he couldn't think straight, much less remember anything. he vaguely recalls makoto's hand at his back, bracing him, makoto's voice: j-just rest...you'll be fine...y-you're fine now... thinking back on it, he doesn't know if he's imagining it -- the wobbly tone, the same tone makoto had when they were children and something had hurt him, made him inconsolably sad.

but what--

haru's own thoughts sever when he spots rin.

he looks...the same. and different. haru swallows and hurries forward, disregarding of the people he runs into even as they, this time, cast him unnerved looks rather than offended ones; haru's attention this time is all for rin though. he doesn't see himself --

-- how he's only half there, bleeding away like a faded watercolor in the wrong light. ]

Rin...!

[ only a few meters away, it does not make sense that the other would not hear him, but haru calls again and this time, close enough to touch, he reaches for rin's elbow. his hand solid enough for the moment, it still doesn't last. haru withdraws the contact almost as soon as it's there -- equal parts annoyed and relieved. this is rin. he would know him anywhere (always, always) but why the lack of response? it wouldn't occur to haru that this is how many of the people in his life have felt -- the ones who reached and reached with varying success. when his hand drops to his side, haru waits, his gaze a searching one from rin's shoes to the crown of his head, checking and double checking in a few scant seconds. from memory he could draw with ease a handful of people.

two of them are here now -- one returned -- but things aren't right.

for the first time being here, haru's heart shapes the words in their plainest terms: i want to go home.

beneath that: an unwillingness to believe most of what he's been told and re-told, an obstinacy that is dangerous in perpetuity, the swimmer who refuses to come up soon enough for air. waiting for rin to see him here and now, haruka nanase holds his breath and burns cold to the touch. ]

Comments

[jawdacity]

[ something happens in the interim of then and now. he thinks of scraping his knee at the bottom of a pool, the acidic pain softened by the water, and isn't sure why the image comes to him — he hasn't stepped into a pool in years. near the end of his childhood, shackled to his textbooks, it had been all he could do to step away from repetitions of chemical formulas and calculus proofs for his nightly runs.

he tucks his cerevice back into his phone. he'd exchanged a few messages with someone, a virtual stranger in this virtual world, but it seems meaningless now. he hears his name, a murmur in the form of a yell, but he doesn't react; the only person who knows him well enough to call him rin here in tellus is makoto, and that hadn't been makoto. it must be a different rin. maybe a rin who came here armed with more than fear and anger, who could fight off the threat with fists or blade and arrow. he's met many in his time here, and all of them seem better suited for this than rin, who can write a ten-page essay and name the composition of earth's atmosphere but who knows nothing of engineering or battle or medicine.

he'd left once more. there's eventuality in that knowledge. if he could only believe that a second return is incumbent, waiting only for the right moment to spring upon him, maybe then rin wouldn't be a scarecrow at the lake's edge, glaring into his own reflection. even warped by ripples, he looks tired, bruises smeared under his eyes; he has never slept well away from the familiar, thoughts electrifying him awake. maybe it's a good thing. if he can't fight off whatever might come, at least he'll be awake for it.

he flinches away from the icy touch at his elbow, catching himself from falling off-balance with a hasty half-step to the left. his first half-mad thought is that one of the aliens swimming in the lake has surfaced and decided to take him for an afternoon snack, but rationality trickles quickly back in.

eyes like the ocean, rin thinks. nonsensically, because he hasn't returned to the ocean since his father died, has scoffed at the romanticism associated with it, has always thought it a terrible thing. nature at its worst: a seething bower of water, angry and calm by turn, erratic by definition.

nanase, rin thinks. and the rest of the evening sinks in: he'd made contact with him, planned to meet up. right.

the years have treated nanase well, filling out the slender shoulders with lean muscle, defining the sharp features. good thing gou never had the opportunity to meet him; she would have lost her mind over the smooth curve of bicep to tricep.

the examination doesn't last long. rin steps away, putting more distance between them; he's not sure why he decided that meeting up with some once-classmate of his was a good idea, but now he has no choice but to commit to the conversation to come. ]

Damn it, Nanase. What did you do, shove your hands in the lake? You know there are aliens in there, right?

[ he doesn't know this boy who might have been a peer of his, who could have been a friend if circumstances had been different. but even if rin can't fight anyone, can't save anyone, he still has the ability to reach out and offer what sparse help that he can.

and that's why he shrugs off his own jacket, tossing it in nanase's direction. ]

Wear that. And keep your hands to yourself.

[ it's gruff, but it's kindness. ]

[freed]

....

[ people say what you don't know can't hurt you.

not for the first time in his life, haru finds 'people' are wrong.

there isn't much time between when haru sends his last text and he finds rin, so it doesn't make sense: the ruffled distance of barely acquaintances present in red eyes. certain memories surface for haru: an impression of rin's eyes glass-cased under a sunset threaded in stitches made for words like 'future' and 'dream'. he remembers this too: salt water displaced from the sea but capsizing all the same, pathways carved for the sake of healing and recognizing the person left in the wake. a procession of white with flashes of red whispering goodbye. rin's voice full of hope then of hurt then both then nothing nothing nothing.

at his sides, haru's arms are deadened things, unknowingly winter cold and near as sharp. rin throws his jacket at him and haru doesn't even move to catch it; he's caught -- snared on the foreign quality stagnating between them, how rin says nanase instead of haru. air thins; haru's chest is tight, burns, fails and fails him just like his words, clotted in his bloodstream like so many bad ideas. because something is wrong here. rin isn't...rin.

or he is, and haru.....

haru can't move past that point.

when he was little, haru's parents let him do more or less what he wanted with so much freedom it was questionable, and this has had its pros and cons throughout the years. we trust you they said when they left and haru's only thought was, okay. not good, not bad, not anything.

not anything at all.

most important to haru, it turns out, are his friends no matter the perceived distance in his behavior or expression. for his friends -- for his team -- haru would do a number of stereotypically non-haru type things. and for the longest time, rin has been one of these -- not just one, but one apart, the proverbial fire under haru's skin that steals inside through the glass of his eyes, cuts him open and leaves a mark without breaking so much as an exhale. to this day, haruka nanase cannot explain it, and in turns still rather dislikes it not for what it invokes in him (this, while unsettling, still serves a purpose -- to swim which is, to haru, to feel alive) but for how he cannot ever explain it. not even to himself. rin is a balancing act on the tip of haru's tongue right now but the words that come after are reluctant. invisible.

rin's jacket hits haru's side and half catches downward, scrunches against one leg even as his brow furrows in a rare transparency: what's going on? are you serious?

his throat hurts. ]

Rin...

[ unlike his initial call, this time the other swimmer's name breaks right in half.

deceptive, considering how on the surface, haru's voice is a quiet, careful thing.

but jagged distrust lodges in his chest, stone reminiscent and just as heavy; and haru himself grows paler by the moment, light refracting right through him in a wholly improbable manner -- the gold flecking in the blue of his irises unholy and ethereal all at once. a water spirit if ever there was one in him. it's likely anyone close can feel the cold emanating off of him the same as a fire would give off its heat in ripples. yet haru himself is, in a certain light, barely even there at all. ]

[jawdacity]

[ again, his name. not the clean distance of ma-tsu-o-ka, but rin, as if nanase is anyone to him but an unfamiliar row of kanji in a roll call list from a past lost to insignificance. rin stares at him, confused and unsettled; his gaze mirrors the glow of afternoon red on the horizon, saturating redder still as the day sinks.

his skin still smells of smoke. his shoulder still aches from the metal that had twisted clean through, the pain blunted by korra's healing but not yet lulled to silence. everything about the present has taken on a cast of unreality: this boy with ocean eyes in a red world, belonging anywhere else but here.

rin swallows, and swallows again.

makoto had mentioned a haru, come to think of it. maybe that's why he'd been so insistent; maybe nanase and makoto had been better friends than rin had known them to be. ]

Ah, right, Makoto mentioned you. Just because he and I are friends doesn't mean we're on first name terms, you know.

[ but he grins to ease the sting of the jibe. it's a watered down facsimile of the usual bright expression that rin blossoms into, but it's an attempt. and nanase won't know the difference; even if makoto has spoken about him frequently enough for nanase to have internalized his first name, he still knows nothing about rin himself. still has no reason to look at rin as if there's are shards of glass spread about them and rin's hand had been the shattering force.

rin shoves his hands into his pockets, taking another step backwards. he can feel the cold coming off in waves from nanase, and he wonders again what it is about this boy that makes goosepimples march down into the hollow of his elbow. he wants to reach for him and shake the answers out of that wordless mouth, to force the color back into his white cheeks.

--what else does tellus hide? a lake in the middle of the garden, teeming with alien life. a boy from a forgotten past, who belongs anywhere but here in rin's space, saying rin's name, seeping his cold reality into rin's skin. what does it mean, that reality and fantasy have merged into one?

maybe, if they'd been born on any of the billions of possible realities outside of this singularity, nanase might have been more than a name at the corner of a group project. maybe they might have been friends.

rin does nothing, though his skin prickles with the inaction.

he only stands there. he grins with his mouth and stares with his eyes and wonders what the hell he's gotten himself into. ]

Just messing with you; you don't have to give me that look. Put the jacket on, alright?

8(

[freed]

But.... we...

[ we're friends too. simple words yet haru cannot seem to dig them out. wintry distemper bleeds soft and omniscient through him, his eyes making sharp climbs up one side of rin and down the other: who are you who are you who are you. how rin touches the back of his neck is familiar though; the relaxed brightness of his intonation; all the edges of the matsuoka rin who haru met so many years ago...they're there. weaponized. disarmed. somewhere in between. rin is rin. except...

...just messing with you --

he's not.

this person in front of him does not know him, does not know him; the words repeat as if caught up in themselves, a fulfilling tangle of frustration and foreignness. makoto mentioned you. surprising, considering the last week or so; and yet not surprising. makoto and haruka co-depend even when they can't seem to stay in the same room for more than five minutes.

there is a certain something rin matsuoka has when he speaks with haru, has had it all his life to the point where haru recognizes it in him as something second-nature. a flicker of fire threaded in counts of three: commitment, faith, passion. aired out, the word competition would do as well but it's never been just that and it never will be. somewhere in the future outside of tellus, rin finds haru on a beach with his hands lifeless on a blank page, his heels dug deep into the sand with the stubbornness of knowing what he does not want still not equating to knowing what he does. rin's shoulder brushes haru's, and haru is cold in this future too but not like now as he crouches to pick up the jacket for lack of anything else to do. rather than listen, rather than put it on, he just holds it -- at the bizarre impasse of feeling wrong whether he keeps it or offers it back, whether he finds it in him to say anything at all or just keeps staring, eyes dilated with the transparency of a word haru tangles with rarely:

fear.

rin doesn't know me.

seemingly a lifetime ago but in reality less than a year: rin matsuoka runs and haruka nanase pursues, grapples with him in the dry earth and insists they still have a chance to see something -- together, everyone -- they have never seen before. they swim together; disqualification is a given and yet they come out having won.

for the team.

at home, rin is going forward and haru has stalled -- cold and pitiless in the water he loves.

here, rin pauses on a precipice haru has no recourse for, while haru himself wards off the stranger of panic.

because he can count on one hand (or less or less or less) the people he trusts.

less.

blue gaze drops to the curve of a mouth but haru cannot make sense of what he's been told in the end. the jacket hangs limp in his grasp and when he quarter turns away, degrees of him disappear in the sun -- the disappearing game even as he finally forces his voice back into existence. ]

This isn't....it's not funny.

[ ultimately communication isn't his strong point.

his vacant hand twitches at his side, the impulse to contact makoto and ask what is going on: innate, visceral...

he curls his fingers. ]

NO

[jawdacity]

[ a thought: drugs?

which isn't as laughable as rin's first instinct makes it out to be, because he isn't blind and deaf to the murmurs of tellus's status as a pleasure planet, its brothels and varied houses of drink open for the those who might wish to indulge. for a quiet-eyed boy from a small town in japan, maybe the low-hanging fruit of the forbidden had been a temptation too great to ignore.

what does rin know about drugs? nanase's gaze is clear, sure, but he moves like a marionette. like someone above tugs at his strings and he's in the midst of struggling to figure out which string is attached to which joint.

someone built like nanase, lean and and sharply cut; he seems built for gracefulness. it's odd, the picture of him as he is: words incised from his throat, a choking stillness in its place. rin watches him, uncomfortable, and tries for another subject to shore up the silence. ]

Yeah. I guess this whole thing --

[ a sweep of his arm, encompassing not just the lake and the gardens and tellus in its entirety but -- the strangeness of their meeting, classmates who had been just that. ]

-- kind of wears on you after awhile.

[ his jacket trails into the grass, anchored by a nerveless hand; rin wonders if he should take it back. wonders if he should take nanase's unwillingness to wear it as an insult. he looks away - quickly, a visual break from the awkwardness of the situation - but the middle distance offers nothing in the form of answers. no new topic to break the congealed silence. rin's teeth clack together. ]

Look, can you just --

[ his hesitation is an exclamation point, two irises on full red display as his eyes widen. ]

Did you just. Disappear?

[ and now rin reaches for him, forgetting the awkwardness in his shock. nanase's hands are cold, colder than before, colder than blood should be. rin clutches at the fingers that slip through his own, not out of propriety or shyness but because they lack entirely in weight or tangibility. ]

Shit. Can you feel that? Are you okay? [ an explosion as rin moves to act, comfortable in his own skin for the first time since nanase stepped onto the scene. he tugs the jacket away, arranges it on nanase's shoulders. then curses under his breath as he loses the weight this stranger's strangeness yet again. ] Nanase, come on, talk to me. Are you feeling okay? Did anything happen before this?

[ he already has his cerevice out, his fingers scrolling to makoto's name without conscious thought. ]

8<<<<<<<

[freed]

[ once in a hospital rin stood at his bedside while haru murmured thank you to him in scraped nuance -- the coarseness of a quiet voice drawn up sharp with river water and influenza. rin looked away then and haru did the same. in the here and now, haru can look nowhere else: sees red red red and would breathe it if he could breathe at all as familiar hands go right through him.

that's--

--ah.

despite his own lithe talent in the pool or the ocean, rin matsuoka is fire and for one reason or another, he has always been a specific constitution of flame that haruka nanase cannot ignore. he tried, years ago, and failed. the opposite happens now: tunnel vision rife with the sort of emotional whiplash reserved for bad dreams. death cold, pretend cold, ghost cold, haru cannot feel him at all but when rin asks him, grapples for contact without success, he runs up against a familiar wall of wordlessness. a small world means many things; for haru it has long meant he did not need to reach too far outside of himself. the ways he might learn how to do so regardless were always lost on him. independence by necessity and a house whose occupants were 90% feline for years breeds insularity. yet even solitude has its exceptions.

cherry blossoms in spring. a dream that shines and does not force. the reliable drive.

but...

--talk to me--

again rin goes through him, the struggle of tapered fingers a lost cause on or around see-through wrists, haru of whipcord muscle contradicted by bird-bone silence; rin says to speak but he can't figure out how. he wonders, irrationally, uncharacteristically, who rin is contacting with his cerevice and his mind affords him makoto but that doesn't help at all. he doesn't know what's happening, can't explain himself or others, and it...

...hurts.

when he swallows his breath rattles, the skittish stray flickering on the periphery of what it wants needs wants needs.

because

rin doesn't know him.

what if--

the weeks of makoto's avoidance builds him into the shape of a stranger; tellus makes shadows out of solid people and haru burns the candle at both ends without meaning to. what might have happened to rin that he has forgotten haru like this, he cannot imagine; he wonders if kisumi comes back if it will be the same, thinks with cliffside wretchedness how that would hurt makoto and what it would mean -- what it means. he's not sleep walking -- this time -- and he's not imagining things whether it's the legitimate distance in sunrise-angled eyes or his own lack of substance. his mind scrambles but the panic is not 1,2,3 so much as a childish scatter of old keepsakes, not numbers but shapes, not concrete so much as suggestion, and it's too much.

is haru disappearing related to rin not remembering him?

what about makoto?

and finally the hard question, the hardest, the one to avoid at all costs for months now, months...:

what about everyone else?

without sense, haru remembers the dog he kept for a short time before his untimely passing, how he'd never felt unfairness like that before. he curled on the porch of the old house and listened for a long time that gray afternoon to the chimes whistling thin from the tachibana residence.

he must be losing it because for a second he hears that same sound but it's not chimes at all, it's something louder and less coherent. torn between panicking forward or backward haru just stays in place, statue still but barely-there to speak of. a stranger walks through the whole of him and barely misses rin but haru doesn't react; can't feel it. when he looks down, he seems almost as the palest watercolor under a too-bright light. rin's jacket has subsequently tangled fully on the ground between them, and when haru finds his voice it casts itself with the insubstantiality of an echo. ]

I don't know....I don't know what is happening.

[ he doesn't even know if he's afraid; it is more that he has no sense for anything anymore; it leaves him falling and haru is reminded painstakingly of a dream with plastic eyes and endless expectations, the rin in front of him extending his hand yet was it better or worse than this? a rin who requires what haru might not have to offer or a rin who does not know him? makoto smiling across an innocuous table nowhere in particular -- not iwatobi not tellus not anything. what kicks in now is perhaps predictable -- though not as they are now;

what's left of haru tenses; ready to bolt. it doesn't matter that he has no idea where.

but he can't handle much more of the stranger in eyes that ought to know him; it fractures in a way that -- if a person has not experienced it before -- leaves the recipient without a coping mechanism, but haru has known his whole life long how to be quiet, how to be unto himself, how to drift --

-- away. ]

[jawdacity]

[ rin grasps for patience, but finds himself empty of it once his efforts have dried up.

there is a problem: nanase is fading and rin doesn't know what to do about it. there are two of them: one with frustration slanted across his brow and the other who, ghost-like, who gapes at him with hollow cheeks.

rin had a nightmare as a child, the same flurry of images that marched through his sleep: two goldfish in a bowl, swimming about one another, their tails tangling like threads of silk. he'd been terrified of them, fear shapeless and unknown but stunning in its force nonetheless. those gaping mouths, those gaping eyes, full to brimming with meaning that a human - with his limited understanding of that secret world of under-sea language - couldn't understand.

but nanase doesn't have that excuse. fading is a terrible thing, a terrifying thing, but standing and gaping at rin without offering explanation nor -- anything at all, really -- makes this whole meeting worthless.

why not call makoto, then? it's an uncharitable thought, and the guilt that follows is well warranted, but the two of them accomplish nothing by staring at one another. rin asks question after question, and nanase says i don't know, and the way forward is barred. rin makes an impatient noise at the back of his throat, muted by the clamp of his teeth; he doesn't want his irritation to be known. nanase seems more terrified of rin himself than the prospect of fading, and that has old insecurities rearing up -- rin matsuoka, girly name and all, good for nothing but trailing his feet in the salt and silt and retreading waters that his father had. in life and - of course - in his final drift towards shore in death. ]

Can you at least -- c'mon -- we should let Makoto know this is happening, okay? He's going to think I'm pulling his leg when I tell him that you upped and went specter on me -- you know him, he's a big baby when it comes to anything supernatural, so -- just. Hold still for a second.

[ it's not rambling so much as filling the silence, pulling the weight of an entire conversation on his own. without asking for permission (he has a sneaking suspicion that he'll receive yet another i don't know in response to that, and tellus has already made fool upon fool of them both, better to barrel forward than dwell on all and sundry that they don't have), rin tugs out his cerevice and snaps a photo.

his usual perfectionism is absent in the finished product: nanase is angled across the screen, hands disappearing into space between them, one eye blue and the other ghostly pale. rin grimaces at the photo, then sends it to makoto in a few thumb flicks.

(this the friend you were talking about? he's disappearing. think he has a problem with me.) ]

Okay. Sent it to him. You want me to call him here?

[freed]

Wai --

[ it takes haru too long to realize what rin is doing. all in all it takes haru too long to accomplish most things by rights, save perhaps for a lap in the pool. not a late bloomer but a reluctant one really across the board, the way he car-crashes into more life than he's shown this whole time is just that: too sudden and full of intent that never hits its mark, a blur of light and shadow that subsequently darts right through the redhead. the way this overlaps, rin is already lowering his cerevice and asking him if haru wants him to call makoto to them and no no no no no.

for the first time, haru does not want makoto here.

to be his voice or not be his voice.

what if their language has changed too deeply?

unhelpful, detrimental, it occurs to him however that despite the alienation makoto is, to everyone else, still makoto.

he'll come and be a version of himself: fuss and worry and dig in up to his neck with anxiety over something haru can neither fix nor explain. if he knew that makoto faces the same peril, he would act differently. but this is the problem with not talking -- or more so, with them, not being themselves where dialogue was not the necessity so much as proximity to Understand. supposing 'nearness' was their bridge one can consider it somewhere at the pit of rocks and river, a ravine threading the questionable distance that sluices between them on repeat. with rin it's different; but with rin it's always different. whether he does not know who haru is or knows haru better than almost anyone else; rin stands alone.

except not in this situation.

when haru fragments into greater negative space, the reality is this: rin won't be able to see hardly any of him save an ocean eye and the trail of a hand as he turns.

and, with the same lack of explanation, runs. in fact, to red eyes, he may seem to have simply...vanished.

something in him reasons (unreasonably reasonably unreasonably) if he's going to disappear, there's something about doing so in anonymity by choice rather than circumstance. to fade away with someone who should Know you but no longer does is...lonely. and haru doesn't like to think of himself as dependent on others but just because a person doesn't like it does not negate it. these things always catch him off guard though; good and bad, and in-between. he never did realize how imperative rin's passion for swimming, his fervor overall, had gotten to him until he almost lost it. to this day he wonders what happened in australia. specifics rather than guesses. maybe now he'll never find out; maybe he's not supposed to.

. . .

haru tries the pool first but as it turns out, ghost-types can't really feel it the same. he leaves and doesn't even need to use the door. ]

[jawdacity]

[ had rin been himself, he might have noticed the tension in haru's body, wound tight by rin's own hand, but as it is -- nanase is a stranger, all of his tics and tells a language 1he hasn't yet learned to speak. he sees only a flash of a cheek, here and gone, like sunlight on the edge of a wave, before nanase begins to run. his trajectory remains as indecipherable as his intent, all rin can do is snatch for him and watch as his fingers comb through empty space.

he feels, strangely, like he's failed some kind of test. all of his filled-in bubbles on a multiple choice exam shifted down one, so not even serendipidity allows him a correct answer here and there. ]

--oi! Where are you going -- ?

[ he received no answers prior to this, and he knows already that he won't receive any more by raising his voice. still, rin's violence of manner is intrinsic. he can't help but to explode into sound and fury, trying to keep nanase present by sheer force of will.

of course it amounts to nothing. nanase doesn't know him; rin has no more power over him than he does the passing breeze. ]

This isn't funny, Nanase! Stop!

[ but nanase is gone, as certain as rin is still here. he reaches for his jacket, brushes off the grass. shifts his weight from foot to foot.

now what the hell is he supposed to do? ]