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Rin’s home now. Usually that’s part of an epilogue.
He’s not sure what he expected; no one plans their stories this far ahead, not even him. No one’s thought about what to do with Rin once he came back, how to fold him completely back into their lives. He’s a missing piece they’ve all long since figured out how to move on without. It’s not to say he’s been left behind, but rather no one should’ve been expected to wait for him.
Which is an interesting rebound compared to what he’s used to. A decade of moving forward and around the world, never staying put long enough to take root. Now he isn’t. He isn’t moving anywhere, and everyone around him carries on as they always have. They’ve always moved slower than him, but suddenly he’s the one tripping on a jarring, static
stop.
And all the people he’s had to make time for over the years now need to learn how to make time for him.
Haru, of course, has experience with the volatility of inertia, and finds him first. Rin asks him if he felt this way when he came home, too.
He considers it for a moment longer than he usually gives Rin’s insecurities. “There’s always Makoto,” he doesn’t answer.
There’s always Makoto, there’s always been Makoto. Whatever Haru’s getting at with that statement fails to resonate with Rin. “That’s not helpful.”
Haru is affronted, adorning a foreign scrunch to his face he only could’ve learned from years of being around Kisumi. He certainly didn’t learn it from any of the rest of them. “Why not? It’s plenty helpful.”
“You’re never helpful,” Rin sighs.
“And yet you come to me every time you need advice,” Haru observes in the closest thing to a wistful tone he’ll ever achieve. It sounds odd lifting his undertone to something trending upwards.
Rin flops gracelessly onto his back from his spot on Haru’s floor. He may as well get comfortable. “I do not.”
“It’s because I know you best.”
“You do not.”
Haru hums unimpressed. “You coming home didn’t sink in until after you got back. You don’t know what to do next. Is that not right?”
“I guess,” Rin mumbles.
“So I’m suggesting you pick up where you left off.”
Rin glares at him as he catches on, memories cranking to life after so many years of hibernation they stutter-start and jumble together for a moment before straightening themselves out. “‘Oh, Rin, um, I’m really sorry. I care about you a lot, but I just don’t feel the same’,” he mimics. Verbatim, including the nervous um, not that Haru needs to know. “That’s where I left off with Makoto. So yeah, not helpful.”
“You’re so difficult,” Haru says with an air of exasperation. “If we all held each other accountable for how we were at seventeen, I wouldn’t be sleeping with Kisumi.” He lets the thought hang unfinished for a moment. “Consistently, anyway.”
“Romantic.”
Haru shrugs it off, as he shrugs everything about Kisumi off, as if it isn’t the weirdest fucking thing to develop in Rin’s absence. “Makoto wasn’t ready for all that. Neither were you. We were kids and you were asking him for too much.”
“How would you know I wasn’t ready?” Rin mumbles.
“Because then I dated you. You were terrible. Good kisser, but terrible. You’re still terrible, but manageable now.”
Rin sits up and glares at him harder. “We dated for a week. Eight years ago.”
“That’s five days longer than anything else you’ve ever had, and do I need to point out you ignored the rest of my argument?”
“No,” Rin groans. “Where’s this coming from anyway? Me and Makoto having a thing is dead and buried by a decade. I’m not even in love with him anymore. And isn’t he seeing someone?”
“Which one? And regardless, they broke up,” Haru informs, and now Rin isn’t convinced that’s not the entire reason Haru had him over. “It’s good timing if you were still interested in him. You’re back, and he’s not so afraid anymore.”
A peculiar way to reason, in Rin’s opinion. Someone else might go with and Makoto’s all grown up now, but Haru wastes no words to get to what he means.
Courage is also an epilogue. Rin hasn’t been around to witness Makoto’s story. The hero always overcomes their fears at the end with the help of a person they love. Clearly, Makoto didn’t need him for that. Not that Rin ever saw him as anything other than brave to begin with. Just differently so, understatedly so.
So it makes Rin, a medal-winner with a few national records, an accomplishment list longer than a skyscraper is tall, stop and ask himself exactly what he could bring to the table for a guy like Makoto who already seems to have his life set on course. Makoto would not need any of Rin’s success or medals to know value.
“That’s a stupid reason,” he decides on saying instead of any of that. “So what if he’s single? Give him time to breathe.”
“Well Rin, if you had checked in with something other than a text more than once every three months you’d know he’s been single for about a year now.”
“I’m not in love with him,” Rin reiterates firmly. His heart doesn’t flutter with denial, his stomach doesn’t knot with anxiety. It’s just as much a fact as a statement about the weather.
Haru shrugs and clasps his ankles where they’re crossed, rocking forwards and backwards as he speaks. “Good. At this life stage a crush that old would just be baggage and unrealistic expectations. You should get to know him again from the ground up.”
Maybe if Rin stares at Haru in silence long enough, lips drawn into a line and eyes narrowed suspiciously, whatever counseling-certified demon that has possessed him will know it has been caught and exorcise itself so Rin doesn’t have to call in a specialist. Instead Haru’s eyes widen in a what is it now? sort of gesture, and Rin sees Haru’s being very much himself and very serious to boot.
“Out, demon. Real Haru doesn’t know shit about relationships.”
Haru scoffs and lowers his gaze along with his tone, and Rin’s sudden onset guilt causes him to flinch. “Whatever.”
“Sorry,” Rin sighs, twisting his fingers in his lap. Haru’s just doing what he does best; trying to help. He’s damn good at it this time around, and Rin is reminded again that everyone’s grown without him. Different. Changed. It’s a lot to take in. “Is this what you invited me over for? I mean I appreciate it. I’ll think about what you said. But I’m not really there right now.”
“That’s not why,” Haru protests soundly. “You’re the one who asked.”
He didn’t outright ask, of course, but at this point choosing his battles with Haru requires clearing a certain bar of quality to commit to, and all bickering these days has a cut-off time of 10 PM for the sake of his cortisol levels and quality of sleep.
“I thought we could race,” he continues.
Rin glances to the clock on the wall. “It’s nearly midnight and I don’t do breaking and entering.”
Haru glowers at him, daring Rin to make fun of his thinly veiled excuse for simply spending time together. Rin bites back a smile at the corner of his lip where it spills over from his impossibly tight chest, and for the first time since he got back he’s happy to be home.
Rin attends a party thrown for his homecoming and feels more like an afterthought plus-one to it. He watches everyone’s endings play out before him from the various walls and corners of Sousuke’s long since broken in home. They all saw what he’s been up to the last few years already. It was on TV. There’s nothing to ask him about besides questions concerning his future he doesn’t have answers to.
So they swap stories with each other that Rin wasn’t there for, reliving it all with laughs and arguing over the mundane details Rin’s hearing about for the first time. Sousuke has an arm slung around whoever’s close enough to reach and hold, teeth and eyes bright as he grins and Rin thinks fondly Sousuke might age and acquire laugh lines before he acquires that permanent crease between his eyebrows he always warned him about. It must’ve been a warning taken to heart.
“-isn’t what happened, Sousuke,” Kisumi protests, his escalating tone carrying Rin out of his thoughts.
“It is too, we were all fucking there. Haru?”
“I remember it how Kisumi does,” Gou interrupts. “You and Haru certainly wouldn’t considering how plastered you were. Kisumi asked at least ten times that you not jump off that ledge. He would never encourage it.”
Haru rolls his eyes and Sousuke shakes his head. “We wouldn’t do anything Kisumi didn’t want us to do.”
“That is such a gigantic lie my own nose grew,” Kisumi groans. “Your entire relationship with me is doing shit with Sousuke that puts me one foot deeper in the grave.”
Haru moves to deny it, and shrugs instead.
Sousuke folds his arms across his chest defiantly and gives Haru’s shoulders a breather- Rin aches that it isn’t his arm anymore hanging off of his friend, and wonders when it changed that Haru allowed Sousuke’s as a replacement- then looks down his nose to the only person other than Rin who hasn’t been participating in nostalgia. “Makoto, then.”
Makoto’s on the other side of the arguing wall, quiet as Rin’s been to stand and observe. He straightens and slaps on a nervous smile that’s too quick and too forced for Rin’s liking, but his eyes are calm of the usual storm that might betray the grin as it used to be. He wasn’t paying attention, and even now isn’t all the way back from wherever he was. “Um?”
“When we went camping,” Haru says vaguely. “The one time.”
Sousuke elbows Haru and gives Rin a seriously where did you find this guy look. Rin shrugs and shakes Sousuke’s eye contact with a sip from the drink in his hand, fearful his all encompassing uneasiness might be too obviously read. “More specifically, like six years ago out at Omimaiko-something campgrounds for a week. When we found that rocky cliff over the lake and jumped in off that old rope left in the tree. Kis claims he told us not to because it was dangerous. But he didn’t say shit.”
Haru nods. “He only said I won’t pay for your funeral, Haru, which is just mean and provocative.”
Makoto looks between the four of them, skipping over Rin in a way that makes him two-dimensional but not unseen. Acknowledged but graciously left out of it. Dog-eared to return to later. “I seem to remember the line about the funeral, and it was me who said it was mean and provocative, Haru. You only said you wanted to- and how could I forget such a deliberate phrasing- swing off the rope and be a Tarzan to your Jane, and Sousuke can be Kerchak- the big hairy gorilla who dies.”
Rin snorts into his cup as Makoto mediates such a stupid thing with the tone of a tenured literature professor. Kisumi and Gou spin directly into an argument with Sousuke and Haru over the trivialities of a six-year old conflict and how Makoto just doesn’t want to take a side since his memory is worse than any of theirs.
Makoto placates idly as if he does it every day already, and once they’re properly tied up in it again without his input, he catches Rin’s eyes with his own and narrows a genuine smile at him. His first since Rin saw him again, and Rin makes it halfway to matching him, thighs tense with the purpose of walking towards him, but Sousuke startles Makoto away when he pulls him in around his neck to have him put an end to the fight.
Rin goes slack and his stomach floods with relief and disappointment simultaneously. It’s not like he has anything to talk about regarding his own life for now and Makoto’s a terrible conversationalist when the subject is himself. They wouldn’t have made it very far. But his smile was nearly bright too, and nearly bright at him. Almost, before it was scared away.
Gou steps out of Sousuke’s trajectory when he begins to drag Makoto to physically stand between Haru and Kisumi who are full-on fighting about it now, and when she steps she catches a heel on the edge of Sousuke’s floor rug and stumbles back. Red wine from her glass arches and spatters onto hers and Rin’s shirts when he grabs her by instinct to catch her, and graciously none of it falls to the rug.
“Woah!” she squeaks. “Sousuke you big lug!”
Sousuke’s since released Makoto and stays frozen mid-lunge for her, eyes wide and sorry, and Kisumi and Haru pause their argument. “Shit.”
She huffs and rolls her eyes, and nods Rin to the kitchen with her. He looks down at his shirt; it’s a white silky button-down and peppered with stain top to bottom. “Heh, it’s a goner, Gou. Don’t worry about it. No getting that out of this. Save your top instead.”
Hers is a darker sleeveless top with a busy floral print, so it’s salvageable. Makoto volunteers to help her out and walks her away to the kitchen. As soon as they’re out of earshot Kisumi lets out a long and deliberate pffft.
“Graceful,” Haru teases, and hops the proverbial fence to rally against Sousuke. The man never held many unwavering allegiances. “You really know how to woo.”
“Shut up, both of you,” Sousuke mumbles, then looks to Rin and his shirt. “Sorry, man.”
“I’ll live. Are you trying to woo my sister?”
“Trying is the operative word and Sou has a shit definition for it,” Kisumi fills in as Rin’s heart sinks. He had no idea it was even a thought for Sousuke, much less a plan. “Waiting your entire life to make a move isn’t trying.”
Sousuke glowers at Kisumi, and Haru by extension who is only offended for being dragged under his scorn. “Not everyone wants to date and settle down straight outta their teenaged years, you fuckin’ fuddies.”
Kisumi scrunches his nose. “The fuck is a fuddy? And if you’d found your soulm-”
“Settle down? He just showed up at my door one day and I was too tired to question it,” Haru interrupts with a dismissive wave. “He got lucky to catch me in such an ambivalent mood.”
Rin takes an involuntary step back when Kisumi looks straight at him, one-hundred percent done with the two idiots on either side. “I’ll have you know you’ve missed nothing but my cold boyfriend and your jackass best friend ganging up on me constantly for years on end, and I’m stealing you to fight back on even ground so don’t even think about siding with them.”
He clears his throat and glances to Haru, more than happy to resume his rivalry and get something back he thought he lost for good. “Haru has sent me photos of you two consistently over the years. Nice ones, too.” Rin narrows his eyes. “Where he’s smiling with you.”
“Dammit,” Haru mutters. Kisumi beams proudly to learn it.
“And take your pick at what sort of terrible stuff I have on Sou. I know it all... well, most.”
“Dammit,” Sousuke sighs.
“And I have significant dirt on Rin as a check and balance here, so you all better play nice,” Makoto announces as he returns to the living room, Gou in tow.
Rin raises his gaze slowly, and can’t help but assume Makoto is referring to his ages old confession that’s been kicked to the forefront of his mind courtesy of Haru. The way Makoto meets his eyes doesn’t tell him either way what he’s referring to. He’s only amused. Makoto’s always amused about something.
“Come on Rin, let me try to get that stain out,” he offers.
Rin shrugs it off again. “It’s really not a big deal. It’s an old shirt.”
Makoto tilts his head. “I swear I have a trick. Gou’s top is as good as new.”
Gou agrees with that claim with a nod, and turns to further admonish Sousuke’s clumsiness. Kisumi forces Haru to show him all of these so-called nice photos on his phone, and Rin threatens to return to the backdrop as inanimate décor and maybe never find his way out at this rate. Would anyone notice, he wonders, if he didn’t say another word the rest of the night? The week? The month?
But Makoto has a funny way of pausing the present and keeping it from going anywhere until he’s ready to let it resume. Rin stops hearing the bicker, the cooing, the apologies. He’s only focused on the amusement reflected in Makoto’s eyes and on his hand part ways outstretched for Rin’s company, promising to lead him forward and away from his merge with the wall. Rin follows Makoto to the kitchen to find out what is so damn funny.
“They’re a real handful,” Makoto laughs as he rests his hip on the counter and folds his arms across his broad chest.
“I’m having a hard time keeping up,” Rin confesses.
“So do I, and I’ve been around.”
Rin decides to pull himself up to sit on the edge of the countertop next to where Makoto’s leaning, which Sousuke will undoubtedly hate. He knows there’s no trick but, “So what’s this trick called?”
“I call it buying you a new shirt,” Makoto answers. “Good as new, since it will be.”
Rin snorts and looks over to see Makoto’s still so fucking tickled about god knows what, glint never leaving his eyes, a new ghostly smile pressed at the corners of his mouth. “Thanks for saving me.”
He shrugs one shoulder. “I’ve never known how to get you alone, so it’s not like I’ll pass up the opportunity a wine stain presents.”
“Last time you had me alone, you didn’t want me alone,” Rin reminds him. He nudges an elbow to Makoto’s arm as he says it to let him know he means nothing ill by it, but it has the effect of coming off cold anyway.
Makoto’s eyes light up further. “Life’s funny like that, isn’t it?”
“Is that what’s got you so dopey?”
“Oh, I’m always dopey, Rin,” he answers without missing a beat.
Rin rolls his eyes. “Yeah-huh. Not to anyone who knows you.”
“Depends on who’s looking.” Or what he chooses to show, maybe. And then, curiously, “Can I ask you something I’ve always been afraid to ask?”
“In general?”
“Afraid to ask you,” Makoto clarifies quieter, and maybe Haru didn’t have it quite right the other day, or maybe Makoto’s finally mastered hiding his fears in plain sight. In any case there’s no courage in his inquiry and Rin’s left to feeling helpless as he usually is when Makoto is unsure, and answers just as uselessly.
“Yes, I wax, and it takes fucking forever.”
Makoto chuckles. “Please.”
“Of course, Makoto.”
The ruckus in the living room trails away; either they’ve all committed to a normal conversation or they’ve chosen to wander outside onto the patio. Rin waits for Makoto to speak. Makoto’s words are probably the only person’s Rin waits for, and won’t rush. That hasn’t changed.
“What did you see in me back then?”
Rin thinks it might suddenly be easier to get the stain out of his shirt than to get that answer past his lips. It’s not that he has no answer, he has a few, but none ever felt okay back then and they still don’t. He’d always hoped Makoto might’ve said yes and then the better answers would follow after that once he knew what he’d been missing out on, but that opportunity never arrived. Instead the best answer has nothing to do with Makoto, which is something that’s always sat funny for Rin who claimed to love him once, and he’s since twisted it to fit a narrative he’s not ready to admit isn’t true.
“You asked me to help Haru.”
“He needed you.”
“No one other than you has ever asked me to help anyone. People always gotta be asked to help me. And shit, you of all people asking someone else to help Haru? I guess you saw me in a way that’s different and my perspective changed too after that. I thought, goddamn would it be nice to be loved by someone who has that much faith in me. Warranted or not.”
Makoto hums. “So you saw in me... what I saw in you?”
Rin blinks quickly in surprise of Makoto’s lightspeed distillation and looks over and down at him. “Huh?”
Makoto’s since directed his unfaltered amusement outwards along the floor. “You fell in love with me because of how I saw you?”
And no- he shouldn’t be surprised Makoto sees the issue in it right away, but he’s more surprised Makoto doesn’t try to hide it. “I guess so.”
“But that’s not me,” Makoto presses. “That’s you. What about me?”
Rin chews his lip, knocked off center by something so direct from a person who would usually circumvent a continent first to avoid it. “Is that why you shot me down? Because you didn’t know what I saw in you?”
“I shot you down because I was seventeen. I’m now retroactively shooting you down again based on this conversation.”
Rin laughs and drops his head to nod in silent acceptance of what he already knew. “Yeah, that’s not a very good reason to ask you to be with me, is it? Does it help if I say I also found you attractive and kind as all hell and that factored in as well? That’s three reasons.”
“A little. You’re now about as qualified to date me as the last person who cheated on me in college.”
“So you’re sizing me up for a mulligan?”
“Doesn’t hurt to test the waters,” he states with an air of finality, and pushes away from the countertop. “Too bad it’s a little chilly for me.”
Rin watches him walk to the edge of the kitchen in a dumb shock as an anchor drops his stomach hard and fast. “Makoto.”
He stops. Somewhere past the threshold, the voices rise with the tide again and threaten to pull Makoto away to warmer waters. It would be the second time Makoto got Rin to himself and turned it down, and that reality leaves Rin with a swell of old panic in his chest. Makoto will have no qualms unpausing the present, returning to his ending, and leaving Rin in the past where he’s lost and floundering. Rin’s brought nothing but himself. He has nothing to offer someone who doesn't need him.
“The ones who cheated on you at least got a first date,” Rin says carefully. For himself, because he doesn’t want to be left here, and Makoto’s maybe the only one who even realizes he isn’t catching up.
“Sure. But they didn’t get mulligans.”
“Good thing I didn’t cheat on you then.”
It gets Makoto to fully turn around and Rin’s so oddly relieved to see he still finds this funny and he doesn’t look down at Rin with pity or worse: directly through him with disgust. “Do you think you’re still in love with me or am I suddenly a challenge where you have none because I’m about to walk away?”
“A challenge,” Rin answers honest, as he is no liar.
He breathes again when Makoto’s lips twitch upwards along with his eyebrows. “That’s a better thing to see in someone, don’t you think?”
Rin can say with confidence his superficial attraction to Makoto hasn’t wavered, but that doesn’t set Rin apart from anyone else either. Still, there’s nothing about Makoto that isn’t part of Rin’s dreams even this far away from a baseless love confession.
Adulthood looks good on Makoto. Even this many years into it, Rin still hasn’t decided if it looks good on himself, but he’s more than captured by the hard lines that’ve taken Makoto over to make up for it. Not all of them are natural, some of them are earned. Not all of them are graceful, some were carved with stress. Rin promises himself he’ll only touch the stress lines and ignore the others; they’re still not for him to crease with his uncertainty.
“I didn’t invite you over,” Makoto says. “In fact, I said I was busy.”
“I know. I wanted to see if you’d let me in anyway.”
Makoto frowns, the faint brackets on either side of his mouth suggesting he’s done it often enough to be practiced. Rin presses a thumb over each pre-approved line, rests his other fingers gently at Makoto’s neck, and keeps the rest of himself at a respectable distance. Makoto keeps his hands at his sides.
“You did,” he continues. “Opened right up.”
“You’re a menace.”
“Think so?” Rin teases. “And if I step closer?”
“I’ll let you.”
“If I kiss you?”
“Find out.”
Rin doesn’t turn down dares, and it isn’t anything like he fantasized about when he was younger to kiss Makoto for the first time. It isn’t anything at all but a gentle, timid touch of lips that Makoto decides to roughen up, not Rin. Rin only mounts the courage to do it and stalls out at the top once he realizes he doesn't know why he’s asking or going through with it. Rin doesn’t do anything.
Makoto puts air in his lungs and forces it back out as damp gasps, Makoto pulls his hair to tilt his chin and kiss his throat. Makoto allows Rin’s hips to press. Makoto tugs Rin’s head to the side and lines his lips along Rin’s flushed, hot ear, and Makoto says
“I have a date in twenty minutes.”
And Makoto lets Rin go to stumble back and blink and catch his breath. “What?”
“I said I was busy,” he repeats.
Rin is sure he pouts, as Makoto’s face splits with a wicked smile, all made up of graceful lines Rin can’t touch. “Take me out instead of whoever the fuck isn’t gonna be good enough.”
One side of Makoto’s mouth draws up in suspicion, his eyes narrow inexplicably playfully. “Why should I?”
“I’m already here, for starters.”
He looks like he wants to laugh, but bites it back. “Keep going.”
“You’re a great fucking kisser,” Rin exhales. “Don’t waste it on a stranger.”
He does laugh now, which is unfair, the way it’s so genuine and distinctly Makoto. Makoto often smiles, but his shameless laughs are harder to find. And for him to expose one at Rin’s expense is dirty, belittling play that is simultaneously basked in light just beyond Rin’s reach.
“Who said it was a stranger?”
Rin chews his cheek and purses his lips in thought. “If it was someone we knew, you wouldn’t be waiting to make yourself fashionably late.”
Makoto laughs again. “Maybe. But again… why should I take you?”
The reactionary cockiness that includes some line about his swim stroke doesn’t ping any bells in Rin’s mind as the necessarily correct thing to say. Makoto’s never impressed by the obvious. In all honesty he’s stumped by whatever vetting process Makoto’s exacting on him, if it’s one at all, and not just a case of a bored cat playing with a flightless bird it stumbled across. “I’m extremely available, and your playing hard to get is a turn on.”
“You’re not very good at this,” Makoto muses as he tilts his head.
“Flirting or kissing?”
“Both.”
“Not at all,” Rin answers on a sigh, a foreign breeze of defeat. “I’m good at swimming, and I’m good at fucking things up with you, apparently.”
“You were so confident a moment ago.”
“And you’ve always had a way of humbling me; glad to see that hasn’t changed.”
Makoto’s smile fades but doesn’t disappear completely. It’s softer, not amused. He’s still standing close, he’s not gone yet, but his arms are limp and don’t tense to hold Rin again any time soon.
Rin considers he has more of a chance than he thinks he does even if it isn’t much, and doesn’t know what changed between his stained shirt and right now that makes him want one to begin with until Makoto goes back in time and takes on the timid tone he used the first time he told Rin no.
“I just don’t know why you’re pushing this,” Makoto says cautiously. Guarded. Rin finally sees just how at arm’s length he’s being held, no matter how genuine or amused Makoto’s smile is, no matter how golden his laugh. “You don’t know what you see in me. You’re not offering anything of yourself. What’s in it for either of us, right here and now?”
“There’s always you,” Rin answers before he can think better of it. “Haru said that. Past or present. And you’re still talking to me, so I guess it’s true whether you want to be that person anymore or not, and I’m still a selfish asshole enough to use you for it. So shit, maybe we haven’t changed and everyone else has and that’s fuckin’ why.”
Then Makoto doesn’t smile at all anymore, but he doesn’t frown either, and he looks over his shoulder to the wall at his back as if he’s being watched or cornered. “I think you’re wrong.”
Rin half-shrugs and gestures out from his sides to shake out the mystery that doesn’t exist. He only brought himself. He doesn’t have these layers Makoto’s looking for, he doesn’t have any plans. He’s only looking for a place to be and hoping the rest catches up. “Well are you going to take me out or not?”
“No,” Makoto responds without hesitation. “I’ve already made plans, for which you’ve made me fashionably late. So I should thank you.”
“Meaning it is a stranger.”
“Meaning you need to leave now.”
Rin rubs at the back of his neck to encourage his blood to flush there, and not at his cheeks in embarrassment, for all the good it does. “Right.”
Makoto gestures to the door and walks him to it, and it isn’t until Rin is back out on his doormat and under the glare of the sun that Makoto speaks again, but not before he narrows his eyes over Rin uncharacteristically critical and nods just once to himself. “Come back tomorrow at six.”
“For dinner?”
“In the morning. It’s a long drive and we’ll be gone all day.”
“To where?”
“I’ll worry about that. You just need to show up.”
“On time?”
Makoto winks- about knocking Rin on his ass- and closes the door.
There’s always Makoto, with his tricks and time traveling, lines Rin can’t touch yet, and a wall ten kilometers high guarded by patrolling smiles. As always, as always; he hasn’t changed. In so many more ways than he is different, he is the same.
He is the same when Rin shows up at 5:55 in the morning, and over two hours later when they’re still driving on a winding quiet road through the woods under filtered morning light. He is the same as he recounts the last decade in graceful, cascading detail where one story feeds into the next across rolling plains of good and bad. He has sequels and prequels, he is an entire compendium of experiences. Yet he is the same when Rin learns about all the reasons he should be very different by now and isn’t.
Makoto doesn’t agree once more when Rin mentions that. Rin is too afraid of the answer to ask him what it means, as he’s finding Makoto’s permanency to be the only thing keeping him grounded. Makoto pauses with him, Makoto makes time.
“And the thrilling conclusion?” Rin pries.
“Excuse me?”
“The date you blew me off for last night. Love of your life? Then you’ve caught me up to the present.”
“I had a nice time,” Makoto answers.
“Which is Mako-speak for I’d’ve rather watched two houseflies going at it on a windowsill, yeah?”
Makoto chuckles. “Whatever puts you more at ease, Rin.”
Rin scoffs and pops open Makoto’s glovebox for the fifth time to rifle through the contents. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well… I’m wearing the same outfit I was yesterday, aren’t I?”
Rin freezes halfway through skimming Makoto’s car maintenance log and looks him over. He can’t for the life of him remember what Makoto wore the day prior, he only recalls his laugh and his lips and yet another rejection, and now he sits in a plain heather grey tee and light jeans snug in all the right places. Not what Rin would wear to a formal date, but Makoto’s tone betrays nothing. “N- Wait- are you?”
Undoubtedly, Makoto’s eyes catch a patch of sun they drive through at just the right angle to be mischievous. “Am I?”
He wrinkles his nose and puts his eyes back on the notebook. Consistent oil changes every eight-thousand kilometers. Tires rotated every six months. “Such a shit. I don’t care who you fuck, so there.”
Serpentine belt replaced two years ago. Windshield chip filled in three months ago. Meticulous, and a ton of reasons Rin isn’t interested in car ownership anytime soon. He returns the book to the box and trades it out with the tire pressure gauge to fiddle with.
“You’ve asked me every question except the one that asks where we’re going,” Makoto muses.
The unending verdant blur out the window is suddenly more interesting than anything else. He re-organizes and closes the glove box and leans an elbow on the door, chin in hand. “Doesn’t matter where. I have nowhere else to be.”
“Then I guess it doesn’t,” Makoto agrees. “As long as you trust me.”
Rin snorts. “Makoto, you could be driving me out to the middle of nowhere to leave me there to walk back to Iwatobi and I’d be immediately convinced you did it for my own good.”
“Rin,” Makoto chides, and before Rin can rescind his morbid train of thought Makoto speaks again. “If I did that, I’d walk with you.”
“But you have somewhere to be, eventually. Unlike me.”
Rin doesn’t miss Makoto’s hands twisting at the steering wheel over faded vinyl that suggests he has a habit of worrying it, and doesn’t know how to feel knowing he struck a chord somewhere deep in what he thought was Makoto’s flawless resolution. “It would be nice to be lost for a little while. I’m too envious of that to let you do it alone.”
“Is that why we’re doing this?” Rin tries. He waits for a non-answer, the only sort of answer he can seem to get out of anyone, the sort of answer he’s getting used to and another carrot on a stick for Makoto to dangle in front of him and make him jump for.
Makoto’s reply is crisp and quick, loaded at the tip of his tongue and ready to fire. “Yes.”
“Ma-”
“Ah, here,” he interrupts, slowing the car and flipping the turn signal over to indicate his departure from an empty road. Rin snaps his mouth shut and lets out a long sigh through his nose. He reminds himself he is patient for Makoto, and patience with Makoto begets results.
Pavement gives way to a worn, one-lane dirt road that requires a vehicle pull off and out of the way if another tries to get by coming from the other direction. There aren’t any signs Rin can catch other than a faded spraypainted no trespassing bolted to a post, broken and almost upside down.
“No one will find us,” Makoto reassures as they pass it, which has the effect of being extremely unsettling.
“Creepy.”
Makoto laughs. “Sorry. I mean whoever owns this area doesn’t check up on it. I’ve been here a few times.”
“That’s not getting lost.”
Makoto points his chin forward and sits up straighter. “... As adults we are encouraged to compromise.”
“So your plan is to get lost somewhere you’ve already been.”
“Something like that. Not quite.”
“Not as poetic.”
Makoto hums and continues on slowly down the road. Rin counts the bumps and jostles along the way and sneaks glances to his sides; to his right is Makoto, no longer amused but beautifully content and haloed by morning light, and to his left his own reflection in the window, just as hopeless and transparent as he feels and doesn’t want to admit to.
Maybe Makoto is different, maybe he is fearless like Haru said. He hasn’t told Rin to fuck off this time. Not yet. Instead they’re getting lost together in places Makoto’s already been to give him a break from what he knows. It counts for something. One day Rin might figure out exactly what.
The car rolls to a stop at the end of the dirt road, its final lurch punctuated with Makoto’s reveal. “Omimaikonakahama.”
“Bless you.”
“When we came here six years ago, the truth is... all anyone could really talk about is how much you would’ve loved it.”
Rin raises his eyes to the front, and sees glimpses of a cozy, carved out clearing through the trees. There’s shoreline in the distance on the other side of a body of water obscured from this angle, and here the wildflowers are bright and so deliberately in bloom Rin wouldn’t put it past Makoto to have chosen this day specifically because he knew the flowers would be at their best then.
“So I promised myself I’d bring you back here once I could, because it isn’t fair you missed out on so much.”
Of course that’s how Makoto sees it; Rin missed out. Rin went on to do so much, he conquered the fucking world. And no one other than Makoto in the face of that fact would dare stake a claim that he missed out, and no one other than Makoto would say it this easily and be so painfully right and mean it that genuinely all at once. Only him- always him- could know what Rin struggles with before Rin himself can figure it out.
His heart flutters, his stomach knots, and this is a shit time to fall in love again. It’s always a shit time to fall in love but this is a shittier time than usual, when the only response he’s been able to garner is rejection.
“Thank you,” Rin whispers through the cracks of the blockade that’s built up in his chest. Whether he’s simply thankful Makoto thought of him, or thankful Makoto has worked his tricks to take him back in time to make up for lost experiences, Rin doesn’t know, but at the very least he has never thanked Makoto enough for looking out for him all these years.
Cooled morning air floods in and the sound hollows out as Makoto swings his door open and uncouples his seat belt, then faces out with his feet on the ground outside. “Don’t thank me yet. Oh- leave your phone. And your shoes… and maybe your shirt.”
Rin doesn’t wonder why he doesn’t inquire this request further at this point- he only strips in his seat and throws his phone to the back to keep it out of direct sunlight. “Pants too, perv?” he asks Makoto’s back.
He twists enough to peek back with interest at Rin over his shoulder. “... I won’t stop you.”
“Jesus,” Rin mutters, though he’s already unfastening his jeans, as all of this is looking suspiciously like a swim in his near future, and absolutely none of it has anything to do with Makoto’s encouragement at all, thanks. “You could’ve just told me to bring a suit.”
“No fun, no mystery,” Makoto says. “I’m not a very mysterious guy, you know. I’ll take all the allure I can get.”
“Mission fucking accomplished.”
Makoto’s already outside of the car and closing the door as Rin says it. It’s not until Rin steps out with him and watches him begin his trek down the worn foot trail that he notices Makoto opted for his boxers too, and the view is only eclipsed by the thought that Makoto already knew he was coming here.
“So why didn’t you bring your suit?” Rin digs a tooth into his tongue in some sort of warped punishment for the timidity he hears creeping into his voice, as if he’s the only one nearly naked. “You knew we would swim.”
“I told you, a compromise. I have to be fair and you did take your pants off...” He slows so Rin catches up and they walk side-by-side. Rin notices Makoto’s pink at his ends, embarrassed as all fuck to be dressed so far down, but he walks tall anyway.
Rin turns his eyes on the rocky ground on alert for anything too sharp as they make their way down the trail. Makoto’s attention doesn’t leave Rin even then, and he teases the backs of their hands together light enough to startle Rin and yank his arm back to his side. “I don’t get you at all.”
“Oh, good. Now we’re getting somewhere.”
A jagged rock digs into the bottom of his foot anyway to distract Rin from pushing whatever that meant, and he hops and hisses a few steps ahead of Makoto to shake out the sting. When he rightens from it Makoto looks on beyond him with infinite fondness and familiarity, betraying his entire act, which is something Rin might rib him for once more if he didn’t then turn that look on him.
“You okay?”
Rin nods and keeps with his back to whatever caught Makoto’s adoration. With his back to it, he’s a part of it- he’s not just Rin- and that soft expression is for him too and he isn’t ready to step out of the way and find it doesn’t follow him. “Yeah.”
“We’re here.”
“Yup.”
Makoto grins under that same devious front he winked with, and it’s just as exasperating a second a time. “And now that you’re with me... I can finally jump.”
His heart thumps with the weight of a textbook dropped onto a table, one beat ahead of his mind as he fills in the blanks. “Makoto.”
“I think…” Makoto trails and moves past Rin forcing him to turn around and take in the view for the first time, “the rope should still be here. Somewhere.”
“Hell fucking no,” Rin protests. “Makoto. Sousuke’s a provocable idiot and drunk-Haru has no fear of death. You’re not them.”
“No but I am me, and I want to jump into the lake.” Makoto walks with purpose towards a large oak on the edge of the drop, and bends his knees to coil his energy for a tall jump. He misses once, twice. On the third jump the leaves shake and Makoto lands back on his feet with a stumble and a thick, knotted rope in his hands, tied on the other end somewhere high up in the tree Rin can’t pinpoint.
Makoto gestures out over the seven-meter drop with one arm. “So what do you think?”
It is gorgeous. Makoto, who always has been and will be even if he is stripped down his silly striped boxers, and the tranquil near-black at the center water below. It’s a small annex of the larger lake beyond, framed with a crescent of raised forest. The opening to the crescent faces east, bracing the rising morning sun just so, and perfectly. Obscured and private. “I think we should enjoy the view from up here, psycho.”
“Every time I come back on my own I can’t do it. I’m too afraid.” He turns to Rin fully and wrings the rope between his hands. “So tell me not to be.”
“O-h no,” Rin laughs. “That’s a legitimate fear. Nope. You are too smart and important to me for this daredevil frat boy shit. Get your highly-valuable ass with a still unbroken-back over here.”
“Wow…” Makoto looks side to side and drops his voice to a shared secret. “It sounds like you sort of like me, Rin Rin.”
Rin grinds his nerves into the dirt with his heel and squares his shoulders. “No, I love you again, moron. At least get it right if you’re gonna tease me.”
“Embarrassing, even after all this rejection?” Makoto goads, or Rin thinks he’s being goaded anyway. “Why?”
Another fucking carrot on another fucking stick and all of this never ending amusement at Rin’s expense. Chin thrown up full tilt to the clouds, Rin groans until it barrels into an echoing growl. “You are so frustrating! That’s why!”
Makoto shuts up and blinks surprised for a moment, and then to Rin’s compounding confusion, lights up inexplicably brighter than the sky behind them and gives a tug to the rope with renewed vigor. He moves towards Rin, rope in hand, and Rin steps forward to meet him when the slack goes taut.
This is it- the sort of kiss he wanted back then but wasn’t ready for. One he earned somehow. Now it means something, after everything. It’s so much better at the end of the road, where he is and yet isn’t, in the middle of nowhere.
But Makoto stops a centimeter from him, takes a deep, steadying breath through his nose and Rin watches in paralyzed terror as that son of a bitch turns, sprints, and swings through the air and over the side. Makoto’s shout echoes into the trees, chased by the muted kuthunk of a splash below.
Rin scrambles to the edge as the rope swings back, narrowly avoiding a smack across the face and bottoms out with relief to catch Makoto as he resurfaces and shakes the water out of his hair. “What the fuck!” he screams down at him. “I- Goddammit!”
“I’m okay!” Makoto shouts back. “Come down here! We should talk about us!”
Rin grabs the rope on the next swing back and glares as hard as he can so Makoto can see it from where he is. Hopefully he doesn’t see Rin’s entire body flushed a flustered beacon-red, but that’s unlikely. “I’m gonna kill the shit out of you!”
“You’d have to jump to do it!”
He knows that; he’s already walking back to get a running start.
“Rin Rin!”
“Fuck off! I’m coming!”
Makoto’s laugh fills the crescent, and sure, that’s worth a jump to get closer to.
Seven meters is a lot taller once Rin’s falling down it; his arms pinwheel and his stomach flutters, a shriller shout than Makoto’s he can’t keep down snaps through air and he cuts feet-first into the lake below hard enough to hurt. It’s freezing. His teeth are already chattering when he surfaces and he buzzes with brimming energy from the shock and the fall.
Makoto swims over to him, lips pale with chill but it doesn’t seem to bother him or keep him from grinning. “Fun, right?”
“No.”
He turns a suddenly contemplative gaze down to the surface of the water. With how everything’s gone, Rin wouldn’t be shocked to find he’s putting his best words into letting him down easy again. And that’s strangely all right, Rin decides, because that doesn’t stop them from spending all this time together or undo the knots Makoto’s managed to tie up in him today. It is a shitty time to fall in love, after all.
“You don’t need someone who doesn’t challenge you and I don’t need someone who takes me for granted. So we’re going to do it right to make sure that doesn’t happen and we’re not going to waste each other’s time.”
“Okay,” Rin agrees, and finds that much comes easy. “Still… thank you.”
“Always, Rin.”
Makoto could kiss him, or Rin hopes he would, but he doesn’t. Too hard to smile doing that which is Makoto’s preference for the time being, they can’t feel their faces anyway, and he likes to think once they leave the here-six-years-ago, there will be plenty of time for Rin to earn it better. Rin has nothing if not time, to Makoto’s apparent benefit.
“You didn’t have to jump off a cliff to prove your point, dickhead.”
“I didn’t,” Makoto says and shrugs. “I just wanted to do it because I could. I’m not that dramatic, Rin.”
Rin rolls his eyes and looks up to where they jumped from, over to the nearest shore, and back to Makoto who’s turning and swimming away in that direction.
“It’s a long walk back up,” Makoto calls. “And if you make it to shore before me, I’ll let you kiss me.”
Rin’s home now. It’s a start.