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0.
He wonders, sometimes, where it all started. The clarity of Haruka’s strokes, the way he cleaved through the water just so, a motility borne out of instinct rather than calculation, first piqued Rei’s interest, or so he assumes at first. If he’s honest with himself, and he always is—honesty has its own kind of cleanliness—Rei can trace the beginning of his curiosity to one Hazuki Nagisa.
1.
Nagisa is so close, close enough for Rei to smell the chlorine on his skin, rose-white and salty pink, to observe in minute detail the drops of water that cling to his hair.
“Hello.” They maintain eye contact, briefly. Rei feels bizarrely and inelegantly staggered, watching Nagisa’s lips move as if in slow motion; the thought occurs to him before he can stifle it that Nagisa’s mouth appears curiously malleable in a way he cannot bring himself to define. A bead of water quivers tenuously on a strand of pale hair and falls cleanly to the floor, as if suddenly relieved of some unspeakable tension. Rei seizes on the infinitesimal disruption as a motion he can easily perceive and quantify, tracing its trajectory from Nagisa’s hair to the damp tiles—and the moment is broken. Nagisa brushes past and time resumes its normal progression, leaving Rei blinking owlishly behind the flimsy shield of his glasses, and it is all he can do to not appear as incongruously and inexplicably shaken as he feels. Nagisa’s absence leaves a strange vacancy in Rei’s perception, as if the truncated intimacy of his presence filled a vacuum left unwittingly hollow.
2.
He’s never thought much about love. Not in the physical sense, at least. He imagines a willowy, demure wife with clean-cut bones and the particular understated perceptiveness that he associates with a grace that he, in his adolescent gaucheness, yearns for but has yet to attain—an eventual inevitability, nothing more. But in the present, his thoughts stray to bubbling laughter, violet eyes, and a casual intimacy whose facility coexists miraculously with its depth. He thinks about a lithe body, taut and svelte, with a trim waist and smoothly muscled limbs. In Nagisa’s body, Rei finds an unanticipated security compressed into its neat compactness. Of course, this is purely hypothetical.
It becomes harder and harder to convince himself that it’s all in the abstract when he wraps his fingers around his cock and jerks himself off with quick, efficient strokes, glasses slipping inelegantly down the bridge of his nose. He thinks of dainty boy-feet and strong arms and comes with a muffled shout that seems swallowed up by the bare expanse of his empty room. The image of his shadowy future wife sheathed in passivity and intellectual couture recedes with only the barest hint of regret, superseded by a boyishly facile grin and expansive, childish laughter. Rei opens eyes that he can’t remember clenching shut and stares at the blank ceiling.
(Oh.) His eyes widen in what may be dismay or the first dawning of realization. Mechanically, he cleans himself off and lies in a post-masturbatory haze before falling asleep trying to calculate Nagisa’s weight and the exact length of his limbs, imagining how neatly the smaller boy would fit folded in his lap like a lover or a child.
3.
“Rei-chan! Good morning!” Nagisa greets him on the train to school the next morning, sliding into the seat next to him, so close that their knees bump. Rei suddenly becomes acutely aware of their proximity, feeling Nagisa’s bony knee through the thin fabric of his uniform slacks, sensing somehow the muted tautness of his thigh. There’s a strangled feeling in Rei’s throat. "Did you forget to breathe again?" Nagisa laughs and nudges Rei's thigh with his knee. "Your face is red like a strawberry. If you're not careful, I'll eat you!" Rei is frozen in a paroxysm of embarrassment and mute horror at the double entendre. A vague detached part of his brain is shocked that he can even think in polysyllables. "Don't worry, I said I'd take responsibility for you, and I will!" Briefly, Nagisa leans into Rei's shoulder, and he starts at the sudden warmth. Nagisa smells clean, like laundry soap and dewy grass and faintly citrus-y. Rei inadvertently inhales deeply and cants his shoulder obligingly. Like something predestined and right, Nagisa rests his head on Rei's shoulder and closes his eyes, content. They slot together so perfectly that Rei is left momentarily breathless at how inevitable it feels. It is natural for him to take Nagisa's hand, for Nagisa to press his lips, butterfly-soft, to the smooth dip in the hollow of his shoulder. He feels it through his blazer and shirt, skin and sinew, and knows that for now, the slenderness of Nagisa's hand in his and the warmth where their thighs are pressed together have a subtle, novel beauty all their own. Rei squeezes Nagisa's hand gently and doesn't let go until they reach the school gates. It's as close to a confession as he can hope to convey, to transfer the aching tension in his chest to Nagisa's open palm, their fingers tangled together in a tender cat's cradle.
4.
Nagisa kisses him in a deserted classroom, a quick press of his mouth to Rei's, damp and fresh. The pink slickness of his mouth is as good as a spoken invitation, but it is all Rei can do to stay upright. Trembling, he clasps Nagisa's shoulders in his palms. Rei's lips graze clumsily against Nagisa's cheekbones, bump into his nose, his throat, the center of his forehead. His skin tastes gently salty but sweeter, cooler, in a way far beyond Rei's grasping comprehension. Nagisa laughs once, quietly, before reaching up to pull Rei in for a proper kiss that leaves them both panting. In thick-fingered tandem, they hasten to unbutton shirts and loosen ties. Rei finds himself on his knees, pressing haphazard kisses to Nagisa's hands, burying his face in the smooth, damp palms almost reverently. He wonders, briefly, if he is in love.
5.
Much later, they stumble into Nagisa's dimly lit bedroom and Nagisa eats Rei out, opening him up with slender fingers and nimble tongue, until Rei is a shivering wreck, laid out on Nagisa’s bed, his cock leaking pre-cum onto his stomach. Rei cries out when Nagisa spreads his thighs and enters him, a mixture of too soon and finally; he feels raw and vulnerable for the briefest instant until Nagisa clasps their hands together tenderly and begins to move, slowly at first, working up to a steady rhythm. Their faces are close enough to kiss, noses a hairsbreadth apart, lips parted expectantly. With each of Nagisa’s pants, Rei can feel a minute breath of air ghost across his face. The tiniest sensations fixate him, and when he comes, it is with the acute awareness of the damp pink spot at the corner of Nagisa’s mouth where he worried it with his tongue, or the play of muscles across his stomach as he thrusts into Rei again and again, finding an angle that makes Rei gasp and arch his back. Nagisa fucks Rei until he is exhausted and spent and comes inside of him, burying his head in Rei’s shoulder, whispering over and over “I love you, Rei-chan.”. Even in his post-coital daze Rei marvels at the ease with which Nagisa expresses himself, the sincerity in his candor. It is the easiest thing in the world to cradle Nagisa’s head in one of his hands and hold him close, to stroke his hair and kiss his eyelids closed.