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“I had a feeling I’d find you here.”
Haruka turns at the sound of a familiar voice. Rin’s face is illuminated by the bright lights of the stadium below them, and there’s a certain, amused twinkle in his eyes.
Haruka tears his eyes away. “Couldn’t sleep.”
Rin shuffles alongside Haruka, leaning with his elbows over the barrier, ever-casual. “Me neither.”
A gentle, chill breeze blows through them both--Haruka’s skin lights up with goosebumps.
Rin bumps their shoulders together. “Hey, Haru.”
“Mm.”
“Did you ever think we’d get this far?”
Haruka looks at Rin from the corner of his eye, catching his disheveled hair blowing in the night air. Rin tucks it haphazardly behind an ear, and something in Haruka’s chest flares with warmth.
“I don’t know,” he says finally.
Rin smiles, somewhat wistfully. “I always knew you’d make it here, somehow,” he continues. “But getting to stand alongside you? Almost feels like--”
“A dream?”
Rin takes a long breath. Exhales. “Yeah.”
Haruka leans incrementally closer. “It’s not a dream.”
Rin smiles. “I’ll believe it when we’re on the podium.”
Haruka huffs a small laugh at that.
He can feel the heat radiating from Rin’s body into the ever-shrinking space between them. He bumps his arm against it, craving that warmth. Rin’s eyes turn towards the ground, and he bumps him gently back. Haruka leans into it--Rin’s warmth is addictive.
They stand in silence for a long moment, looking out over the city lights. Below them, people flit back and forth through the night like fireflies. Haruka’s pinky finger twitches next to Rin’s hand.
He wants .
“Rin.”
“Hm?”
Haruka’s chest is bursting with light. He might have forgotten how to breathe.
There was a certain moment, Haruka thinks, where his entire world shifted to spin on the axis of Rin . It wasn’t here, on a hill overlooking the city the night before a race. It wasn’t at Haruka’s doorstep, early in the morning, with Rin ringing his doorbell with a duffel bag and plane tickets in hand. It wasn’t in an abandoned swim club in the dead of night, seeing the shadow of someone who had been barely more than a ghost to him for three years.
If he were to try to pinpoint the exact moment, he might think of a boy, standing under a cherry blossom tree in early spring, arms casually behind his head and an impish grin on his face.
If you swim with me, I’ll show you a sight you’ve never seen before!
“Rin,” Haruka says again, more firmly.
Rin laughs. “Yeah? What is it, Haru?”
Haruka takes a long, steadying breath, tightening his grip on the barrier. He focuses on the feeling of the cold metal on his hands, his eyes fixed on the stadium below them.
“Can I kiss you?” he asks the night air.
He feels Rin freeze beside him, carefully flinching away from the point of contact between them. “Wh-- what? You… what would you wanna do something like that for?!” Rin’s voice shakes. He forces out a nervous laugh, as if it were a joke.
It’s not a joke.
Haruka turns slowly to look Rin in the eye. All signs of Rin’s previous casual attitude have vanished--his shoulders are hunched, his eyes nervously flicking between Haru’s face and some far-off point beyond him.
They look at each other for a long moment, Haruka willing his eyes to convey everything he couldn’t find the words for (or could , but he wasn’t ready to say them--and Rin wasn’t ready to hear them, not yet).
Rin’s hands clench and unclench at his side; Haruka wants to hold them steady. “Okay,” he finally says, as if to himself, “okay. I’ll make you a deal.”
Haruka’s brow furrows. “A deal?”
Rin nods, serious. “Yeah. If--if you win tomorrow,” he says, and Haruka’s eye is briefly drawn to his throat, where his Adam’s apple bobs. “If you win tomorrow… you can kiss me.”
Haruka inhales, filled with more competitive drive than he’s ever felt in his life --and isn’t it funny, how Rin always brings that out in him? He nods. “Okay. And if you win?”
Rin grins in that lopsided way of his, the kind that touches his eyes and makes him look years younger. Haruka thinks this smile is his favorite. “ When I win,” he says, standing up a bit straighter, “ I get to kiss you .”
Haruka can’t help but smile. “Deal.”