Chapter Text
There was an anger in him. Haruka had always known it. He’d been told for years and years that if he didn’t get a handle on it, that it would burn him up from the inside. The words hadn’t made any sense to him. That burning, roiling emotion had kept him alive for years… what would he be without it?
He knows now that his anger had been a facade. A red hot weapon to hide the true emotions he felt from the world. It had been a stop gap, something not meant to last so long but only until he could safely heal his hurts. The hurt, loneliness, and grief had finally broken through the anger after he’d arrived in Makochi. He’d finally felt safe enough to let it go.
Now, staring in the angered face of this boy who he’d come to care for far too much, far too quickly… Haruka understood what it meant to be burned alive by it.
Hayato was a candle burning at both ends. His story is still unknown but Haruka could see what lurked beneath the surface. The grief, the fear, the loneliness that was feeding the flames that burned at Hayato’s edges.
“I’m sorry,” Haruka says and means it. His chest aches with it. “It’s not safe, at the beach. You’re still injured and I don’t have the supplies nor,” Haruka pauses, a lump in his throat at the truth, “Nor the means to continue like this. The center does and they can help find your pod too.”
There is betrayal and hurt in Hayato’s lone brown eye. They’d argued viciously the night before and then all day. Now, with the setting sun turning everything golden and sun-kissed, it seemed that Hayato had given up on believing in Haruka’s intentions fully and truly good.
“My pod,” Hayato says in a low voice that swelled with anger and broke with grief, “left me to die.”
The next morning found them silent. Hayato had laid in the corner of the pool closest to the window but still furthest from the door. His back to the room and below the water where Haruka couldn’t easily speak with him. There was a lot that should be said between them before the day’s events, but Haruka knew that all of it would remain unsaid. Time was not on his side, nor was Hayato’s trust it seemed.
Hiragi had arrived just before dawn with his car’s backseat outfitted with the most ominous black tarp. Hayato watches him from his spot, laid low in the pool. The older man doesn’t step further into the house than the doorway, resolutely ignoring the baleful stare boring into him. He chats with Haruka on their way to the car.
“It looks more like we’re preparing for a murder,” Haruka had mumbled half to himself and half to Hiragi. They’d inspected the car and added any last minute touches. “Whys a bucket belted into the front?”
Hiragi glanced over at him. “It’s got ice in it and some towels. Summer is a poor time to move aquanids and even this early, the air is too dry.” He frowns.
“Gotta keep him wet, right,” Haruka says robotically as he turns back to the house. The brunette’s final parting words from the night before still rang in his ears.
Hayato is, as before, weirdly light in his arms. The struggle with carrying him isn’t his weight, it’s the unwieldiness of the length of his tail and fins. Every part of him that’s damply pressed against Haruka is too warm again. The fever back from their arguing and the stress of the preparations for the move, the strain too much for his still healing body to handle. Stressed and exhausted as he is, Hayato still attempted to try to hide it. It’s bad, what with his arms wrapped around Haruka’s neck and face pressed into Haruka’s shoulder.
It’s not the safest way to travel, but they decide to let Hayato stay as he is in Haruka’s arms. The moment Haruka had gone to set him down in the seat and Hayato had tightened his hold. Hiragi had taken one look at the trembling, white knuckled grip on Haruka’s shirt and quietly suggested a change in plans. That’s how he finds himself sitting almost sideways in Hiragi’s back seat with Hayato in his lap, tail and fins stretched as much as possible across the rest.
“You’ve never been in a car before,” Haruka murmurs under his breath to Hayato in question, “have you?”
If it hadn’t been for how closely Hayato was pressed to him, Haruka would have probably missed the small nod. Somehow, Haruka thinks it hadn’t been a very good first experience for the brunette. So he holds him, thankful for the change of clothes he has in Hiragi’s trunk as the dampness soaks into his shorts, and tries his hardest to both comfort Hayato and keep him comfortable. Haruka pretends that his heart doesn’t ache every time Hayato flinches or whines. Just runs a hand gently down his spine and over his dorsal fin.
It’s a long and uncomfortable ride for all of them.
There is no one waiting at the gate, the dock door, or the entrance to the tanks when they get there. In a way, it’s good. Haruka’s mood had soured drastically over the course of the ride. While it’d been a nice surprise when Hayato had finally and most likely passed out, Haruka had found himself more upset. There was no other way to get him to the center, Haruka knew, but the fact that it couldn’t have been a good or even new experience for Hayato made some of those old ugly feelings surge darkly in his chest.
Haruka was also a little angry with himself for being even a little excited about Hayato being at the center. Just the idea of being able to see Hayato in his home element, fins unfurled in the water around him, was exhilarating. Hayato’s clear anxiety and fear about it all was what made Haruka angry with himself and with Hayato’s past. At least, he could be comforted by the fact that Hayato was safe here and safer still with the Makochi pod all back.
Speaking of the pod, Tsubaki and Umemiya had pressed themselves against the glass wall of the tank. Umemiya’s platinum white scales and fins nearly glowed in the low light and the brightness of his tail almost hid Tsubaki’s deep black completely. If not for the brilliant vermillion of his tail fin, Tsubaki would have been nearly unnoticeable. Well, that and the way he’d mashed his face against the glass. Haruka made a mean face at them both.
Behind them, he could just make out the others. Mitsuki and Kyotaro were generally the most eye-catching. Mitsuki for the light green of his scales and fins that usually drifted lazily around him, the spikes in his fins looking similar to the fish his pod took their name from. Then with Kyotaro it was mostly due to his sheer size. He dwarfed them all when he straightened to his full length, which was rare. Then again, members of the Orca pods mingling with other pods was also rare. Faintly, Haruka could make out the spotty gray of Kotoha before the glass ended and the wall began.
A lilting whistling sound came from either Tsubaki or Ume as they began to round the curve. Hayato stiffened in his grasp at the sound, head lifting just enough that Haruka could only assume he was looking behind them.
Getting Hayato to let go had been, ironically, the easy part. A splash of Mitsuki’s tail and a trilling sentence in their language had Hayato letting Haruka release him into the water with little more than a quiet almost whimper. Kotoha joins them for a short while. Their conversation sounded like something one would hear at an orchestra with how musical the spoken language of aquanids is. She slips away again after what Haruka thinks was a questioning. Surprisingly, Hayato lets Mitsuki half bowl him over the edge and into the deeper water just minutes after Kotoha leaves.
The first look of Hayato in his element is horribly nerve wrenching. It feels like everything has gone terribly wrong with how there’s already cloudiness in the water from blood and a lot of angry, shielding body language from Mitsuki. Haruka realizes that this is the first time he’s ever seen Mitsuki’s fins in their entirety. The usually fringe-like fins were fanned out around him, partially obscuring Hayato from view, and giving Kotoha a pretty background of pistachio to stare down their crowding elders. Tsubaki and Ume both look sufficiently cowed and apologetic. Kyotaro looks constipated, which likely means he’s both offended on Ume’s behalf and amused.
“How many stitches do you think he’ll need this time,” Kaji asks around a sucker. It must be all but gone since the question comes out clear.
“I can’t believe he didn’t wait,” Hiragi says with his head in his hands. “We talked about this so many times.”
They’re half way down the stairs, on a viewing platform. Haruka gazes at the stand off thoughtfully. “Twenty-five,” he announces his bet.
Kaji’s laugh is mean and bright. “Fifty.”
“Forty,” Hiragi adds after a few more complaints about the situation.
Haruka wins the bet.
Ume only needs ten because of Hayato. The others are because of Kotoha, expected, and Mitsuki, less expected. Haruka feels a bit better about having to eventually leave knowing that Mitsuki seems to have taken quite a liking to Hayato. It’s a strange feeling, probably not unlike something a parent feels leaving a child at school for the first time. Though Haruka isn’t quite sure it’s the same.
He isn’t worried that Hayato will be without care. If anything, he’ll get better care here from Kotoha. Haruka isn’t worried that he won’t eat either, if anything Hayato will have better quality food here. All his needs will be met by the center or by the pod he’s currently meeting. Yet, Haruka still feels that feeling, a hollow aching worry.
Briefly, it’s washed away with the awe that wells up at the first unobstructed sight of Hayato fully in his element. His fins are fully elongated and ripple around him like tissue thin, sheer white silk. The low, blue light from the hall and the warm, golden sunlight make warring glimmers across his pale skin and the spotting along his tail. Haruka is mesmerized, realizing that he really couldn’t be mad at himself for wanting to see Hayato like this.
The bandages that break up the black and red spotting on Hayato’s tail, along with the still dark bruising on his pale skin are harsh reality checks. Haruka’s awe is almost brutally crushed by the still echoing words from the evening before. He wonders, distantly and with a rapidly fading quickness, if Hayato was still mad at him for bringing him here. Haruka isn’t sure he wants to consider the answer.
He wants to consider it even less when, hours later, as he is going to leave things go a little sideways. There is banging on the glass in the hallway Haruka is standing in. Hayato is beating the glass and yelling, screaming, at Haruka. The water around him is cloudy, like he’s bleeding, and it takes Umemiya wrapping himself around Hayato to make him stop. When Hayato throws his head back with a loud wail, chest heaving and hitching… Haruka realizes that Hayato is crying.
Haruka doesn’t go home.