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Rin was six years old when his father went off to sea and never came back. He was six years old and held his little sister’s hand at the back of the funeral procession, all clad in sorrow and white silk. He was six years old with people telling him “it’ll be okay son, it’ll get easier to bear eventually”.
Somehow, he thinks, it never did.
He remembers the weeks following the funeral clearly. His grandmother’s wrinkled fingers scrubbing dishes in the kitchen sink for hours and hours, the taste of the casseroles that the old widow next door would bring over (to this day he can never really eat spaghetti without thinking about how their mother would cry over the empty seat at the kitchen table).
He remembers that cold emptiness inside of him that never really went away.
If Rin understood this feeling he didn’t understand how it would stay with him. Carve its way in between his ribs and live there like a wound. When he was seven and angry, when he was fourteen and driven, when he was seventeen and defeated. It would always be there.
He held his little sister's hand at the back of the funeral procession, tearstained cheeks and tired sorrow, while their mother thanked people for coming, for the flowers, for plastic wrapped dinners in the fridge that they would eat for weeks. She would thank and thank and thank, with a smile that was as gentle as it was hollow.
Rin remembered their mother’s wide, tear-filled eyes clearest of all. He and Gou hadn’t woken up when the police men knocked on their door in the early hours of morning to deliver the news. He hadn’t heard Miyako Matsuoka’s desperate shattered howls. He hadn’t seen her shaking her way into a new reality while stoic policemen patted her on the back and brewed her tea and explained that her husband’s fishingboat had capsized during the night’s bad weather. They had found no survivors.
Rin remembered her waking them up hours later, eyes swollen and red with shed tears. It wasn’t a weekend, but they weren’t going to school today, he remembered her telling them. Something had happened to dad’s boat, he remembered her telling them. Dad was dead, he remembered her telling them.
Their father had been their rock. He had been the broad shoulders that could carry them all, the warm hands, the wide smile. Still, for all of his life, Rin would remember the way his mother had gathered them both up in her arms right then, and held them tight until their sobbing turned to hiccups.
At seventeen, Rin would have his father’s road shoulders and wide smile. But the way he wore his heart right there on his sleeve, that he had from his mother.
Their mother tried to hide her tears for so many of those first months. She wanted to be strong for them both, but her husband had been the strong one, the one with the smile that could turn whimpers into laughter. Toraichi had always been the one who could make Rin tell him why he was really upset when he would throw his pencil case at the wall, or who could calm Gou down whenever she was upset that he was leaving for his trips, because 'We'll have a blast when I get back – won't we, my little mermaid?'
Matsuoka Miyako could do none of that. Rin would rage and cry and throw things at the walls, and Gou would whimper and grab onto her pant leg whenever she would left for work.
She wanted so badly to be strong for them both, but then Gou picked out a good night story, and she found a leaf of Toraichi’s rolling paper placed nonchalantly between the pages as a bookmark. She read the story with shaking breath, and cried herself to sleep after, like so many nights before.
Rin had found the bedroom door ajar one day, and his mother crying over a pile of clean shirts. He held his breath as he watched; he saw her shaking shoulders and quiet sobs; the way she wiped the wetness away before anyone could see. The way she took a deep, shaking breath and went back to folding the laundry.
Their father had always been the one who could gather them up in his strong arms and make it feel like nothing in the world could hurt them. Rin could feel his mother’s hands trembling as she embraced them. He watched her from the crack in the door and swore he would never be a strain on her tired shoulders again.
Maybe this was where it really started; where darkness took refuge in the empty spaces between his ribs. When sorrow sat itself like a weight on his chest, and he spent twelve years learning how to breathe around it.
His father’s death was a wound that would not heal. Matsuoka Rin would grow up all thick skin and strained expressions. He grew up tough, and he didn’t; he adopted his mother’s tears and he clung to his father’s easy smiles.
As the years went by, he got really good at faking them.
Toraichi Matsuoka’s fishing boat capsized and sunk on a stormy night. They say they found the wreck of the boat, but never the men who had been on it. They had trawled the area for days, they say. The undercurrent must have dragged them out into the sea, they say.
Toraichi Matsuoka died on that stormy summer night. They had buried an empty casket but the grave was overlooking the sea, so it had to count for something, right?
A four-year-old girl would carry the loss of it in her heart for the rest of her life. In trembling fingers that hesitate to let go. A young mother was left alone with her grief, with two small children to support, with student loans and mortgages to pay.
But this was a story about boys and dreams and swimming. There was so little room here for Gou at four, and five, and six years old. Growing up waiting by the door every time her mother would leave for work. So little room for Miyako Matsuoka’s grief sunken cheeks and tired eyes. Working herself threadbare to pay the bills that kept piling up and up.
There was so little room in this story for a young mother crying herself raw in her bedroom, over toothbrushes and shirts and old polaroid photos from their college days. For her falling asleep on the couch after late night hospital shifts, waking from sweet dreams to her new, crushing, terrifying reality.
She’s a single mother now, a widow.
Let's tell the story of the entire Matsuoka Family, and the grief that they carry.
Let’s tell the story of how, even with the insurance and the extra shifts at the hospital, savings would grow thin and bills would pile up. Miyako boxed all their belongings up in cardboard boxes, her husband’s shirts got wet with tearstains and she dropped a vase they received on their wedding day. (The crystal shattered on the dark stone floor; she thought about stormy oceans and felt seasick).
Let’s tell the story of how she moved them all in with Toraichi’s mother, who, in her tired grief, welcomed the noise and life.
Gou settled in easily. Granny had a back yard bathed in evening sun, with pretty flowers and an old cat who would chase ribbons if you dragged them in front of her. She stood on her tippy toes at the kitchen counter and watched with wide eyes as granny’s steady hands cooked made meals and intricate cakes.
Still, she would whimper and cry whenever her mother was leaving for work. Granny would muss up her hair and set her on the kitchen counter and teach her how to make hot tea for rainy days.
When Miyako came home, there was a cup of tea on the counter beside a plate of cookies. (The tea was cold, and the cookies burnt, but she had never tasted anything sweeter.)
Rin, on the other hand, did not settle in well.
The garden was too warm in the evening sun, the cat clawed at him when he tried to pet her. He watched his Miyako's shoulders droop tiredly after nights at the hospital – she fell asleep on the couch with her shoes on more days than not. He watched the way her eyes didn’t sparkle like they used to; the way her laugh was so much more hollow.
His father’s laugh would have made this house a home. But here, there was only her mother’s grief-thin frame, here was only Gou waking up to nightmares, here was only his grandmother growing thinner and frailer before his young eyes.
(Or, there wasn’t only this. There was also neighbor boy with eyes like glaciers.
They met on a sunny Sunday evening, the first week at granny’s. When Gou fell off her bike and scraped her knee in front of Sousuke’s house. He brought band-aids from his father’s corner store and patched her up with a gentle hand. Telling her funny stories until her tears turned to laughter.
Rin held his sister’s hand and watched the way Sousuke smiled. Wide and gentle. In a way that almost made Rin feel like home again.)
Rin and Sousuke would go on adventures in the back yards: they challenged each other to duels with wooden sticks. They were knights saving kingdoms, Jedi saving a galaxy – Gou trailed behind at their heels, but refused to be a damsel for them to save. She decided to be the dragon, and practices her roar while their grandmother’s grumpy cat became the unwilling princess.
On warm summer evenings, Rin came home with his sides sore from laughing, and the sun on his grandmother’s porch almost felt nice.
Months went by, then a year. Miyako still wore her wedding ring. She would still wipe away tears as she pulled Gou’s hair back with the hair-tie her husband bought before he left for his last trip. She would cry, and she would kiss their sleeping heads goodnight after late shifts.
She cried, but she wiped away the tears and took them to the beach on hot summer days.
This would become a part of their story too; how, at five years old, Gou stood rigid at the water’s edge. Eyes watching the waves carefully, little hands clutching a plastic shovel – her weapon of choice. She dug a trench around the spot where she played, and when the larger waves broke over it, she would jump back and squeal in a way that was far from childish delight. Her mother wrapped her in a fluffy towel, and didn’t connect her husband’s death with the way her daughter stared stone-faced at the ocean, as if she expected it to jump up and wash her away.
(Gou would have nightmares about stormy seas all her life. She would wake up trembling under three layers of blankets. It would be years before she stopped looking at the shoreline as if it is a warzone.)
Rin had turned seven years old by then. He smiled more as the years went by, after meeting Sousuke, or starting school, or after granny’s grumpy cat had finally decided this firecracker child would be allowed to pet him as well. Still, there seemed to be a tiredness that he carried. Something that made him seem so much older than his years.
But somehow, standing here with his feet in the water, with the sea breeze mussing up his hair, the smell of salt and seaweed filling his senses, he felt lighter. It felt as if the weight of it all washed away with the cold waves, little by little.
Maybe it was the way he looked at the ocean – eyes wide and amazed. Or maybe it was the way he looked so much like his father standing there with the sea washing around his thin ankles. When they got home, Miyako pulled out one of her husband’s oldest photo albums. This time, when Rin found her in her bedroom, she was wiping tears off her cheeks with a smile.
“Your father-” she started, before cutting herself off to take a shaking breath. In her hand was an old, yellowed photograph. A group of boys a few years older than Rin himself, with medals around their necks grinning widely at the camera.
“You know, Rin? Your father loved to swim,” she told him. “I don’t think I ever saw him as happy as when he swam – apart from when we had you and your sister.”
There is a smile on her face that Rin, in his young years, could not fully comprehend. Something between nostalgia and melancholy. “He dreamt of competing in the Olympics,” she said. Holding the photo like a treasure. “Oh, how he wanted that, and he could have gone so far, but it never happened for him.”
Rin watched the photograph, yellowed and bent at the corners, old pieces of tape still sticking to the top as if it had been taken down and hung up many times over. His father’s smile was wide and easy, a happiness so genuine it made something stir in his chest.
He made his mother sign him up for swimming lessons the very next day.
The Rin we know is (was) seventeen years of sorrow and defeat tucked into his frame. He was an unlit stick of dynamite just waiting for a spark to ignite. But in those first years, when he was short and thin and knock kneed, swimming had been what kept the storms thundering inside his chest at bay. He found something there in the water. Something like a dream. Something like a calm.
Something like himself.
He still carried a darkness inside of him. One that settled in his ribcage at five years old, and one that wouldn’t really fully dissipate.
You don’t get over it, you just learn to live with it. You break a little every time something happens that you want to tell them about, you break a little at empty seats at the dinner table, or that missing pair of shoes in the hallway, or watching your mother wear her wedding ring even years later. You break, but you learn how to breathe around it.
Rin did learn how to breathe around it for a while. His grandmother’s house was still too quiet, his mother still cried when she thought no one was watching, Gou still dreamt about stormy oceans and woke up trembling. But underwater, everything seemed to wash away.
He learned how to breathe for a while. He taped the old photograph up over his bed; beside it, he pasted clippings and articles on Olympic swimmers and competitions. He fell asleep to his father’s grin at night; his fingers curling around his sheets with resolve. He would stand where his father could not someday; he would fulfill his dreams.
(Swimming was as close as he could get to his father, wasn’t it? Seven years old and already chasing ghosts.
Was this learning how to move on?)
When Rin was eleven and Gou was ten, their grandmother died on a cold autumn day. A summer cold having left her frail for months.
Rin held his sister’s hand at the back of another funeral procession; their Miyako Matsuoka cried at another empty seat at the dinner table, and people told him how everything would be fine eventually.
Gou understood more now than she did the last time. She understood the funeral and her mother’s tears and the cold lump in the pit of her belly. She rolled up her sleeves, brewed tea for her mother and heated the casseroles Mrs. Yamazaki brought over. Granny’s old apron was still too large for her, but she didn’t need a footstool to reach over the kitchen counter anymore.
Granny left them the house and the porch and the grumpy old cat who turned grumpier without the old woman’s presence. Gou helped her mother pack up granny’s things in cardboard boxes. They cried and laughed and drank tea in the afternoon sun with the cat snoring by their feet.
(You learn how to breathe around it.
Gou sat by Miyako's side in the warm sunlight and scratched the cat’s ear. She thought about all the things that granny taught her, and maybe she cried a bit right then, but there were flowers sprouting in the flowerbeds that granny had tended to for years.
She held her mother’s hand and breathed.)
Miyako would still fall asleep on the living room sofa after late nights at the hospital. Gou had not yet turned eleven when she started waking herself up, tiptoeing downstairs to see if her mother had made it to bed. She would make sure to drape a blanket over her sleeping mother’s shoulders on those nights she hadn’t.
Rin spent the weeks after the funeral swimming from early morning until the pool closed at night. He walked home with his body aching with a different kind of tiredness. He went home exhausted and fell into dreamless sleep without eating dinner.
A month later, Rin was sent home from school for fighting. A boy said something thoughtless about fathers, and Rin bloodied his nose and refused to apologize. Miyako didn’t try hiding her tears when she read the letter from the principal.
Frustrated, she had told him his father would be disappointed in him. Rin had spat back at her that his father was dead and what the fuck did she know anyway. He had pushed himself away from the kitchen table hard enough to knock his chair over, and locked himself in his room.
He didn’t open even when Gou knocked, muttering “Nii-chan, open the door, Mama’s not mad anymore, come on Nii-chan, I promise she’s not crying”.
Rin didn’t open. He buried his head in his pillow and cried until he thought there were no more tears to shed (there always were).
In hindsight, this may be the point where Gou truly started relying on others to pull him back from places where she could not reach him. She pulled on her shoes and ran over to the next-door neighbor’s house without bringing a jacket.
Sousuke was at his bedroom door fifteen minutes later, all cool collectedness and wide grins and video games and competition. They played Mario Cart until the sun went down and arranged a duel over the last can of soda. Rin suspected Sousuke let him win when he only demanded three rematches, but laughed with genuineness for the first time in weeks
(They had learned to know each other over years and years. They became something like best friends, like rivals, like brothers growing up together, sharing hopes and dreams and weaknesses and fears.
Over the years, Sousuke came to learn all Rin’s sharp edges and ugly scars. The things that lived in his dreams at night and the things he hid from underwater. Yet he never treated him like the others did, like he was made of porcelain, fragile and waiting to shatter. So when Rin had been sent home from school for fighting, when he had shut himself in his room, shutting out everyone, Sousuke had shown up at their front door with cans of soda and a wide smile.)
Sousuke Yamazaki with his strength and his steadiness and his glacier eyes became the stony cliffs to Rin’s turbulent seas. Sousuke never treated him like he was made of glass. But after the sixth round of Mario Kart and the fourth can of soda, he paused the game and looked at him quietly.
“You made Gou cry again,” he said, and Rin sighed.
“Dude, I made my mom cry,” he said, and tears were stinging his eyes again. “I’m a piece of shit”.
Sousuke watched him for a moment, then leaned back, hands behind his head. “We’re all pieces of shit,” he said. "They'll forgive you, just face it headfirst".
Then, apparently deciding that was enough deep conversation for one day, Sousuke's face split into a wide grin. "Restart the game, I’m gonna destroy you using goddamn Baby Peach”.
Sousuke never treated him like he was made of glass. He never told him “I know how you feel” or “It’ll feel better eventually”. He offered something different. Something calm and steady. Whenever he was around, Rin could feel the tensions leave his shoulders little by little.
The next day when Rin came home from swimming, he tossed his bag aside in the hallway and joined Gou and his mother at the kitchen table.
Years went by and Gou discovered boys in a way that Rin never seemed to discover girls. The blushing and the shy glances over schoolyards, giggling with her friends in the girl’s bathroom. She kissed a boy for the first time at eleven, her toes bare in summer grass. She held the hands of another a sweltering summer night, at the kiosk that sold her favourite ice cream. Rin fumed and skulked on the sidelines of her attention, but it was Sousuke who knocked heads together when boys made her cry.
(Few boys made her cry, she rarely let them get closer than a soft touch, never beyond a shy kiss. There would always be this little voice in her head telling her that it would end eventually. Always a little knot in her stomach that would tighten at goodbyes. Even at her young age she had grown tired of feeling absence aching in her like a phantom pain
So Gou kissed boys and held hands. She went to the movies and split milkshakes. When the night was over, she curled up in the sofa watching her brother and the neighbour boy played video games, fighting loudly over rules.
The days when Rin fell asleep from too much training, Gou would rope Sousuke into watching Disney movies with her. He would groan and complain, but would always say yes, even if he would turn pink at the romantic scenes).
Rin discovered boys sometimes later – or was it just a boy? Haru’s eyes had been ocean deep, his demeanour calm and quiet as the sea after a storm. Rin had never known it was possible to feel as if you were drowning and that you had finally found a foothold at the very same time.
This is the part of the story that we know. Rin and his dreams about teams and relays and a place where you’re part of something. Rin and his demons. Sadness and anger bursting violently. Rin and the bridges he would build, and the ones he burned down.
A lesson he would have to learn; his friends weren’t there to carry his demons for him, and he shouldn’t expect them to.
It would take him many years to learn this, but he would learn it eventually.
His first lesson was a hard one. Sousuke’s path was not his; Sousuke chased his own dreams, where Rin eventually set out to fulfill his father’s. They fought on the side of a pool, and were sent home with notes to their mothers (Miyako cried, and Rin did too). They fought, and Sousuke quit the relay team, and suddenly swimming together wasn’t as fun anymore.
This is the part of the story we know. Rin switched schools to swim at Iwatobi, looking for a team. He found Haru and Makoto and Nagisa, he found a place where he felt like he belonged - like he was part of something. (And afterwards, he would spend so many years after this trying to find it again).
Miyako took time off from work and sat on the bleachers with Gou at the relay. Gou watched her brother's bright smile, digging her small hands into the happiness she saw in his eyes, hiding it away for a day when it would be needed.
This is the part of the story we know. Rin with his eyes firmly fixed on the future. On his dreams.
(Rin Matsuoka leared how to breathe in a way that left everyone around him breathless.)
“I want to go to Australia” he told Gou and Miyako at the kitchen table at twelve. “Coach told me this really good school for swimming, He said I was good enough. I want to go”
Here’s a part of the story that was never told; Miyako watching her son’s bright eyes over the kitchen table as he asked to travel across the ocean to chase his ambitions. She didn’t question it, the fiery look in his eyes, the way they shone with passion, and a sort of hunger. She had seen it before.
Toraichi had looked at the world with that same look in his eyes, from the first day she knew him, to the day Rin had taken his first shaking steps on the first snowy Sunday of his first December, or when Gou had spoken her first words (they had been dada, of course they had). Miyako remembered the blazing fire behind those eyes, that smile that could chase away all your hurts. The way he had hefted Rin above his head with a triumphant yell, or how he had teased her about Gou’s first words until it became clear she would call everything dada, including the neighbours old dog, her potted orchids that Miyako could never seem to keep alive, and her.
Miyako remembered it and she ached, and she ached.
And she smiled and she did not cry. Now was not the time for that. She drew a shaking breath. “Your father would be so proud,” she told him.
This was the first thing that Rin had asked of her in so long, and she would give it to him. Even if affording it would mean months and months of extra shifts at the hospital – working herself sunken cheeked and threadbare, falling asleep on the sofa with her shoes on – kissing their tired heads good night long after they had gone to bed.
Even if it meant sending away her son at thirteen.
(Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about a mother sending her son out into the world at thirteen years old. Trusting another couple with his safety and his health and his happiness. Let’s talk about Miyako packing Rin's bags and dropping him off at an airport. Kissing his cheek and telling him "remember to write," even when he never did.
This was his dream after all. Miyako would wipe her tears and wave goodbye on airport halls for years until one day when Rin would come back tall and distant and told her that she didn’t need to pick him up at the airport, he’d go straight to Samezuka, and he had a lift already.)
“Why do you swim?”
Rin would ask Haruka this in a dark locker room, fingers gripping Haru’s arms like death. He would ask as if an answer would fix anything at all.
But what about Rin? Why did he swim?
Rin Matsuoka had been thirteen years old when he went to Australia, carrying his father’s dreams on his small shoulders. He grew up hundreds of miles away from everyone he loved - from everyone who loved him.
On his first night there, he lay awake with his head echoing a language he didn’t understand. He wondered into the darkness of the room, would find something to belong to here?
Rin would spend years chasing his dead father’s dust-covered ambitions. Maybe he swam because he thought that if he was just able to fulfill his father’s dreams, then the cold darkness inside of him would disappear? Maybe he believed that if he just became a little bit more like his father, then his mother wouldn’t look so sad? Maybe it was because he was part of something here?
Or maybe it was because the first time he dove under the azure blue water and watched the sunlight break the surface, he actually felt like he was home?
He’d had places he felt at home once. People, who felt like home. At Iwatobi, he had held happiness in the palm of his hand, he had carved good days into bricks and left them under blossoming cherry trees. Those days had been his and Haru’s and Makoto’s and Nagisa’s. They had been happy and they had been together. They had belonged.
Before that, he had found home in Sousuke’s smile. In the adventures they dreamt up in their own backyards. In cold popsicles on hot summer days. And rivalry and competition and so, so much laughter.
There was belonging in his mother's warm embraces, too. In Gou's bright smile as she trailed at his heels. It had been warm, but it had not been enough.
There was still a restlessness bubbling in Rin's belly. A need to become better at swimming. to prove that this world was where the belonged. To chase a dream that had bloomed from his father's yellowed photos and his mother's melancholy stories.
But even this world grew dark around him. Sousuke got better and better and better at swimming. He grew tall and broad and got accepted into the best schools while Rin was a continent away. Meanwhile Rin couldn’t beat his own times. He couldn’t beat Haru in that first winter. He told his new classmates about the way the cherry blossoms bloomed in spring, and they only saw pretty trees. The water was only water to them.
Gou wrote letters about the cat growing older and grumpier, about how Sousuke seemed to be getting more and more popular with the girls, and about how their mother still fell asleep on the couch some nights, but had gotten better at getting Sundays off to visit their father’s grave. She sent photos of cherry trees blossoming.
And Sousuke wrote letters about the competitions he won. Letters with news and accomplishments grew heavy in Rin's hand. Jealousy bubbled in his belly. Something like resentment whispered in the back of his mind. The day Sousuke wrote about being accepted into the most elite swimming school in Tokyo, Rin tore the letter into pieces without answering.
Australia became a hollow battlefield, even if the swimming halls smelled like childhood - even if all languages sounded the same under water. Rin kept the letters in a drawer in his room in Sidney. Reading them whenever homesickness weighed so heavy on him that he couldn’t quite breathe and it was too late at night to visit the swimming halls.
He didn't answer as often. As time went by, it became harder and harder to keep that desperation out of his own letters. The ‘I miss you’s screamed I want to come home. The ‘I’ll be the best, just you wait’s screamed I can’t I can’t I can’t. And more and more half-written letters ended up crumbled in the bin, riddled with tearstains.
He stopped writing at all eventually. Even as Gou sent him good night texts or photos of the cat or the cherry blossom trees every day, and his mother called once a week, and Sousuke kept writing for months before he gave up.
At the end of his first semester in Sidney, he had found a small sunlit beach where the salt spray of the waves reminded him of his mother’s embraces, of Gou’s easy laughs. On clear days, the ocean gleamed azure blue, and he thought of Haru’s eyes. He felt a homesickness so heavy it made him nauseous.
(Why do you swim? He would ask Haruka in a dark locker room. Would he have been able to answer that question himself?)
Gou would grab his hand at fourteen. She had grown taller than him, having hit her growth spurt before he did. Miyako still had to wipe away tears every time she would drop him off at the airport. She would kiss Rin’s cheek and go home to an emptier house. But Gou had long since stopped crying at farewells in airport halls.
She had grown so much in the years he had been gone; so much more of a woman now than the wiry, wide eyed twelve-year-old he had left behind for the first time. Still, smooth ivory knuckles gripped his sleeve like death.
“Australia doesn’t know how to heal you”, she told him in a whisper, “You won’t find what you are looking for there”.
Rin thought about cherry blossoms but never said anything. He told them both goodbye (and goodbye and goodbye and goodbye and goodbye) and got on the plane with his darkness in tow.
What about Gou in all this? Gou who lost her father at four years old and would never learn how to swim? At eleven she watched her brother’s bright eyes over the kitchen table. She watched as he grew further and further apart from her, who took the time to text him every day despite so rarely getting a reply.
This was a part of the story that was never told. But it was her story nonetheless. Gou walking alone to school, carrying a loneliness that she had never known before. Sitting on the couch in the quiet living room, while the gaming console stood dusty and unused by the TV. Eating lunch with Sousuke at school, trying to talk around the Rin-shaped hole between them. Watching him leave for Tokyo some years later, seeing the texts and phone calls stop, and thinking 'yeah, that looks about right'.
She would spend years dreaming about stormy seas and sinking ships. She would wake up trembling and will herself back to sleep. At the beach, she would stand stiff-shouldered with her toes in the sand, and watch the ocean like the prey would watch a predator.
She would never let anyone teach her how to swim.
Yes, let’s talk about Gou in all this. Growing up slicing herself on her brother’s sharp edges. Listening to slamming doors and screaming matches between him and their mother, then dragging Sousuke over to pull Rin out of his funk.
When Rin went away to chase his dreams, Gou was left learning about loneliness. She tasted it every time she walked past her brother’s empty room, every time she ate dinner alone because their mother had to work late, every time she stumbled her way up the hill alone to visit her father’s grave.
Rin would promise to write; he would promise to call and to come home and visit. But years would go by and a day would come when he wouldn’t remember to call her on her birthday. A day would come when he came back with a gift card from the airport gift shop because "I didn’t know what you liked".
This was the weight she would carry. Her brother growing cold and distant. Leaving her behind without ever even noticing. This was the weight she would carry. Everything she would eventually be willing to do to bring the boy he had been back. With his bright eyes and the ocean beating around his ankles.
(At sixteen Gou watched the way Makoto Tachibana would lift Ren and Ran into loving arms with envy bubbling in her belly. Makoto always looked at them with all the gentleness and love a brother could offer. Meanwhile Rin was too busy chasing ghosts to ever stop and hold her hand).
Gou would set herself on fire to suck the sadness from his bones. She would do it in a heartbeat. Rin came back, cold and distant. And Gou rolled up her sleeves and got to work.
And what about their mother? Miyako Matsuoka tired eyed and still wearing her wedding ring after years and years and years. Miyako Matsuoka working herself threadbare to put her children through the best schools – to make sure they had the right uniforms and good shoes and the best bookbags for their growing backs. Miyako Matsuoka falling asleep on the sofa after late shifts or by the computer after sending just one more email before going to bed.
Miyako Matsuoka worrying and worrying. Over the bills and her parents’ waning health and over her children. She was a mother after all.
On the outskirts of the story we were told, she worried for her son who seemed to call her less and less as he grew older. Even after those years in Australia were over, and he was back in the same city, without the time differences or the distance.
"I don't even know what you're up to most days, it's like you're further away than you ever were in Australia. Are you eating well?” She asked him one of the few times he had called her back. “Yeah mom, but listen I gotta go. I’m really busy, but I’ll come home soon, I promise”
She hung up the phone and wondered if Toraichi would have known how to get him to talk to them.
And she worried for her daughter, who had spent years and years by the phone. And even now, when she came home after her first day of high school, breathless and elated.
“Guess what, mom!” she had yelled before even taking off her shoes. Her red hair had been in disarray, the hairtie her father had bought so many years before sat lopsided on her loose ponytail. “I joined the calligraphy club, and the swim team!”
“Oh! But didn't you want to join the cooking club?” She had asked, because granny’s recipe books always sat open and dogeared on the kitchen counter, and the dinner was always warm when she got home from work.
“Well, yeah,” Gou had said. “But the calligraphy club takes up much less time, and the swim club is going to be an all-day, all-night kind of deal, I mean, those boys need to be whipped into shape they're so not up to standard their muscle mass –-“
“Sweetie, you can't swim,” she had said carefully. Turning as Gou entered the kitchen. Her daughter’s cheeks were flushed with excitement, there was something burning in her bright red eyes had reminded her of Toraichi just then. Of Rin, too.
Gou shook her head.
“They needed a manager,” she explained. “Or, they needed a fourth member to be allowed to start the club. I thought I’d try my hand at it. Haruka-Senpai and Makoto-Senpai and Nagisa-Kun all did swimming way back in elementary, do they just need someone to whip them into shape you know?”
“Gou,” she asked. “Does this have something to do with your brother?”
Rin had barely come home for the summer. When he had, he had been quiet and withdrawn. After moving into the Samezuka dorms, he hadn’t been home once. Gou didn’t look at her when she answered.
“I'm--” She trailed off, staring at the ground.
“Sweetie,” She continued. “it's okay to do something for yourself sometimes too, you know?”
Gou stirred at that. Spinning in a way that made her ponytail dance around her shoulders. She had that look in her eyes again. The one Rin had had at the kitchen table all those years ago. The one Toraichi had had so often.
“This is what I want, Mom!” She had yelled. Hands balled at her sides, eyes flashing bright. Looking so much like her brother had with all his fierce determination. “Rin is hurting and I can help. I need to do something!”
And that was that.
And this was Gou. Living to pick up all her brother’s broken pieces. This was Gou, always seeming to live more for others than for herself. Who at seven had learned to cook fried rice and omelettes and simple curries "because granny gets tired during the day and you need something healthy to eat when you gets in tonight".
Even now, the food was warm on the table when she got home from work. Even now, Miyako woke up wrapped in a blanket on those days when she fell asleep in front of the computer.
At sixteen, Gou watched her brother withdraw, and rolled her sleeves up and did everything she could to help him. Miyako watched, and she worried. But Gou’s eyes flashed like Toraichi’s had done so many years before, so then, that was that.
Gou rang Nanase Haruka’s doorbell. She managed a swim club. Some nights she fell asleep on the couch with books about nutrition and training regimens spread out on the table in front of her.
Months later, Rin finally cried with happiness at the edge of a new summer. And Gou stood on the sidelines of his attention, weeping with that same happiness.
Rin and the boys had been disqualified from that last relay. But Rin cried with joy, and came home for dinner that night for the first time in months.
After that, Rin would keep swimming. It wouln't be because of the yellowed old photograph that she had given him once. It wasn’t because of the quiet underwater. Nor was it a search for belonging. It was for himself, finally.
Gou would still smile like the sun when Rin remembered to call her. She would start cooking more, though after a while Miyako would have to gently remind her that not every dish was improved with chocolate-flavored protein powder. She might even have let Sousuke teach her how to swim. Eventually.
Miyako Matsuoka would still worry about her children; she was a mother after all. Rin would forget to call, and Gou would pick up books about athlete’s injuries and ask her questions about treatments that she could only give disappointing answers to. There would still be heartache for them all in the future. Sousuke would be injured, Haru would be lost, Rin would be left alone in a dark locker room, and he would cry like something that was broken, staining Sousuke’s shirt with tears.
There were still empty seats at the dinner table, there were still flowers to plant and graves to visit. Injuries and rehabilitation. There would still be heartache in the future, and they would have to learn how to breathe around this, too.
Years went by, and Miyako would still wear her wedding ring from time to time. The thin gold band still said Yours eternally, with the date of their marriage. They had been so young. Toraichi had looked at her with a fire in his eyes that she saw in her children’s every day. When Rin finally made it to the Olympics, she took two weeks off from work and travelled with him.
They had been so young, and now she was here, needing glasses because of too many nights staring at the computer screen, crow’s feet around her eyes, and smile lines around her mouth. They had been so young, and now she was here. On a bleacher in a different country, a crowd around her yelling her son’s name. Gou, older, taking time off from university to cheer her brother on like she had done so many times before.
There she was, older. She had buried a husband, and she buried his mother, and some years later, she buried her own parents. She had gotten to watch only one of her children grow up, been there for both good and bad days, for crushes on neighbour boys and teenage heartbreaks. She had wiped her tears in graveyards, and in airport halls, and after kissing her children’s sleeping heads after late shifts. She hadn’t gotten to watch Rin grow tall, hadn’t been there when his voice had cracked, or the first heartbreak. But he had come back to her, and he had gotten to watch him mature, face obstacles, fall in love.
Gou was older and taller, and there was a boy by her side that she had decided to let love her. That would text her goodnight and that she wasn’t scared would leave at all. Miyako watched them, and thought about the way Toraichi kissed her forehead in their very first apartment.
She wiped her tears, sitting on a bleacher in a different country.
Toraichi’s yellowed old photograph stood framed on a dresser in the house back home, amidst photos of her children smiling, newspaper clippings of Rin with medals and achievements, of Gou with her diplomas and scholarships. There were flowers growing in the back yard, and Mrs. Yamazaki was locking herself in to feed the new kitten while they were gone.
When Rin won his first medal, she thought you would have been proud, wouldn’t you Toraichi, of everything he has done? When he laughed, and wrapped his arms around his little sister, and his best friend from childhood, and the boy he had decided to love who wore a medal as well. When he came over and kissed Gou's cheek and put his medal around her neck, she thought you would have been so proud, wouldn’t you, of the man he has become?
There would still be heartache in their futures. There were still empty seats and graves to visit. There were still tears and bad days, but Rin had his arms around his sister now, and Gou was giggling with the medal around her neck. Miyako Matsuoka wrapped her arms around her children, and the sun was warm on their faces.