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June in Iwatobi is monsoon season. It arrives with a rush of fanfare and packed luggage carrying everything the word “monsoon” entails, boxes bursting at the seams. Street vendors swap ramen for somen and hiyashi chuuka. Air conditioners are switched on and stay on for another two-and-a-half months. Fans whir continuously. Women dab at their foreheads with handkerchiefs and carry brightly-colored parasols at all times.
There are rainy days, thick and heavy, when water falls in silver-gray sheets that makes smoke rise as it hits the ground. The rainy days are followed by humid ones, one after the other, like beads on a string. The air grows hot and stuffy, laid out like an oppressive, stifling blanket. Insects hover close to the ground, bodies swollen with summer somnolence, poster-faces for natsubate, shimmery iridescent wings – like a mirage, like the slow glisten of scales along the line of Haruka’s spine – barely moving, as though they and everything that makes up the World have collectively forgotten how to breathe.
When Sousuke starts climbing the temple stairs up to the house, it is a little after sunset, dark and muggy, and it has just begun to rain, the murmur of the cicadas drowned out by the long relieved sigh of a sky letting out at last, and the insistent patter of raindrops on rooftops. Sousuke grits his teeth and pulls his squad jacket over his head, but the walk is a full five minutes from the bottom of the hill to Haruka’s doorstep, and by the time Sousuke gets there he is wet through to the skin with warm, tepid water that has settled in his hair and soaked into his bones.
The water is warm, but Sousuke still shivers as he stoops to remove his damp shoes and damp-er socks and unlocks the door with his keys, stepping over the threshold with the shoes in one hand.
“Tadaima,” he calls, and receives – characteristically – an expectant silence, as though the house is holding its breath. The walls of the house – Haruka’s house; despite the five years Sousuke has lived in it with him, it is, and always will be, Haruka’s – look down at Sousuke, disapproval palpable in the weight of their silent judgment. The faint smell of something grilled lingers in the air.
You’re late, the walls hum, with uncanny awareness, which, really, is nothing new, in the context of Haruka’s house. Five years along and Sousuke is finally - in the process of – getting used to the shrill whistle of the teapot calling good morning, and the tall bathroom mirror, which has finally progressed from outright insults to barbed compliments, and the fact that the bathtub’s faucets are labelled “fresh” (left) and “salt” (right) instead of “hot” and “cold”. There are some things that take a lifetime to get used to, and even then the lifetime might not be enough.
As Sousuke advances further into the house, he calls, “Haruka,” – not Haru, but Haruka. He takes his time with it, drawing out the syllables, and it feels more intimate, somehow, than the oft-employed nickname, “I know you’re home!”
The words echo, faintly, before fading into silence. It is a familiar, comfortable sort of silence. They’ve never been big talkers, Sousuke and Haruka. That is Rin’s job. Rin, bright and daring and beautiful, A Firework Of A Man, exploding in a shower of dazzling light.
Rin’s father had been like that, too, before he had sputtered out, a flame doused in too much water. Sousuke remembers the funeral – he was seven and Rin was six – remembers standing off to the side to watch the solemn white procession pass down the road. There hadn’t been a body – it had not been retrieved – but Sousuke had seen enough beached, bloated bodies to know what it would have looked like: pale and puckered, the way skin gets when it has been submerged too long. It is one of the things that comes with living in a fishing town.
Rin had been in the procession, with his sister clutching his side, small face pinched and drawn in a way that seemed blasphemous, in a way, like something That Never Should Have Happened. He was swamped by the large white robe he wore, and stared at the ground as he walked, not looking up, no matter how hard and weighty Sousuke’s stare had been.
There had been a whisper in the funeral marchers’ wake – Sousuke cannot remember if someone had actually been speaking or if he was recalling something he had heard before – a whisper of a rumor, a quiet It Was No Ordinary Sinking and Have You Heard? They’re Back.
And after the road cleared, and Sousuke was left standing at the edge where the grass met gravel, he glanced across and caught sight of a dark-haired boy standing on the other side. There was another boy clutching at him – like Gou had clung to Rin – but Sousuke barely noticed him, unable to look away from the dark-haired boy’s arresting blue eyes. There was something surreal about him, as though he didn’t quite fit into his surroundings, as though he belonged somewhere else. A chill had gone down Sousuke’s spine when the boy’s eyes met his, like cold water slowly trickling down his back.
He can hear the dip-and-swell of water as he takes the stairs, two-at-a-time, to the first floor, slower and less rhythmic than the rain beating out a tempo against the roof-tiles. Sousuke tosses his shirt and jacket into the laundry basket on his way into the bathroom. His trousers are damp, too, but somehow not as much as his other clothes. He raps once, against the door – a courtesy knock – before unceremoniously pushing it in.
Haruka lies immersed in bathwater, his head resting against the wall, arms crossed over his chest. The length of his tail, an opalescent blue, curls along the edge, too long to be contained within the confines of the bathtub, large translucent fins clinging wetly to the tiles along the wall. Sousuke can see the veins running through the thin skin over his eyelids, the shadows at his lashes and along his cheekbones, mottled pale brown and blue.
“Not so much as a hello?” Sousuke keeps his voice deliberately light. “Is that the sort of welcome I get coming home after a long, exhausting week away?”
Haruka does not open his eyes. “Exactly the sort you deserve,” he says, blank, but the play of muscle in his arms, drawn taut, gives away his irritation.
“I’m sorry,” Sousuke moves to sit on the bathtub’s edge, setting his back against the wall’s damp tile-work, so that there is two-finger’s worth of space between his thigh and Haruka’s head. He watches the water ripple across Haruka’s tail, shadows chasing shadows. He adds, “I missed my bus.”
Haruka doesn’t say anything. The slow drip-drip of the faucet – it is leaky and due for a fix – seems to be synchronized to the pattern of their breathing: slow, quick, quick, slow. Like a foxtrot, Sousuke thinks, aimlessly, and feels a smile quirk at the edges of his mouth.
“What’s so funny?” Haruka says, and glancing down, Sousuke sees that he has opened his eyes, and is looking, mulishly, in Sousuke’s direction. The familiar spark of lightening-cold-water flickers along Sousuke’s spine.
“Nothing,” Sousuke says, and reaches out, slowly, to place his hand along the curve of Haruka’s head. Haruka’s hair is wet at the edges but dryer near the scalp – he hasn’t washed his hair yet. He shoots Sousuke a suspicious look but does not protest the action. Sousuke cards his fingers through Haruka’s hair, slowly, the calluses on his fingers catching on the strands.
“You’ve been using saltwater a lot, lately,” Sousuke comments, as he pours water over Haruka’s hair and carefully lathers shampoo into his scalp.
There is another long moment of quiet. Then Haruka tips his chin back to look Sousuke in the eye.
“Feeling restless,” he says, voice raspy, as if with disuse.
Sousuke nods. It was about this time – a week into July, with rain coming down like a waterfall let loose – that the boat had gone down. He calls it a boat, but it had been a cruise ship, and the tour had been a Victory Tour, and the survivors had been a yellow-haired captain and a navy-headed navigator, and no red-headed champion.
More recently – a summer ago, one week Sousuke did not get the weekend off – he’d come home the next Friday night to find the bathtub empty. He remembers the sense of panic: Sudden and Deep and Overpowering, feet caught in a whirlpool with no manner of escape – he’d stumbled, down the steps and across the road towards the beach, heart thudding out a staccato pattern in his throat,
don’t leave don’t leave don’t leave and not you too not you too not you too
and the answering measure of Haruka’s heartbeat against his own when he found him, hair in a dark halo around his head, fingernails caught in the fabric of Sousuke’s shirt,
mine mine mine mine
Of course, Haruka is on the same page as Sousuke, so when Sousuke says, lips brushing against Haruka’s temple, “I wonder if it was An Ordinary Sinking?”
Haruka replies, slowly, “there’s no way to tell, is there?”
Haruka sits up, then, hair rinsed out. He pulls the plug, and the bathwater swills into the drain with a noisy, musical gurgle. The slits along the sides of Haruka’s throat flap in dissent as the bathtub empties. His legs appear, long and brown with Summer Sun. No matter how many times he’s seen this, Sousuke thinks, as Haruka grasps Sousuke’s elbow to help himself up, he will never cease to be amazed at how the scales melt away, blue giving away to skin, fins folding into two, long-toed, bony human feet.
Haruka catches him avert his eyes and a slow smile appears on his face. “Nothing you haven’t seen before,” he murmurs, soft and sharp all at once, and leans into Sousuke on the way out.
Later, they lie, on Sousuke-and-Haruka’s bed in Sousuke-and-Haruka’s bedroom on the first floor of Haruka’s house, side-by-side, on their backs, hands entwined in the space between them. Sousuke can hear the soft rush of Haruka’s breathing, see the tip of a blue-green scale above the hem of his shirt collar, and when he turns his head he finds Haruka is looking back, eyes unblinking, and very, very blue.
This time, the burn is slower, travels lower. Sousuke, leaning over to curve an arm around Haruka’s waist, is glad it is dark. He can feel Haruka smile against his shoulder, the prick of teeth pressed against a collarbone in a brief, open-mouth kiss. Haruka hooks his foot around Sousuke’s knee, hips settling against Sousuke’s.
“Saltwater,” Haruka says against the pulse point in Sousuke’s throat, in the quiet thoughtful manner of one continuing a conversation, “cleans wounds.”
And Sousuke takes that to mean that sometimes, it feels better to hurt, instead of being numb.
Overhead, the rain drums on.
-fin.