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. ]