Hello! Please say ‘hello’ to the Haruka Birthday Event held by @nanaseharukabirthdayexchange for 2024!
This is a little something I wrote for Haruka for today’s prompt: Past + Future, hope you like it! (〃ω〃)
507 words
Free!
Nanase Haruka, Azuma Ryuuji
‘Will everything be alright…’
Haruka isn’t so sure anymore. He’s swimming in unknown waters, so to speak.
Everybody else, seem to be in a tentative attention towards him, trying to gauge out what the next step should be.
What’s the gentlest approach to this jigsaw that is him right now.
Haruka’s old form was a poem. The prodigy, the dolphin, the magic itself that walked among common mortals...
“Just watching him swim will make you understand—“ everyone that knew him used to say.
‘Understand’… understand what exactly though?
To one it was the ‘essence of beauty’, to the next the ‘meaning of life’…
They all had something different to have found in his existence.
But they all did have something in common, the experience that they were satisfied and peaceful yet full of energy and hope.
‘Hope’— as if they had just encountered the secret of life. The freedom to ‘be’.
To all he was, is and will continue being the swimmer with the grace, elegance and power of almost a deity born out of Lady Sea herself.
Ryuuji knows Haruka is merely a young man, only starting to walk this earth. He knows full well the depths of his power but also the abyss of his despairs— if they do manage to catch him.
He’s witnessed the care and love Haruka is surrounded with and he can rest assured that no matter how hard things will get from now on — and they will get hard — that Haruka still has people to turn to.
They won’t be of much help on their own, but he won’t be either if the one in question doesn’t open up to someone and for Ryuuji the truth is that he’s bad with feelings and making people trust him.
Haruka almost broke down in his arms completely during the Olympics, trying to chase after Albert, and he sensed that something was off— he flat out asked him if he was alright and Haruka lied through his teeth at him.
‘If only there was a way to establish a friendlier stance— a closer approach.’
But then he wouldn’t be himself, huh— Ryuuji knows himself as much.
And he knows, still, that this boy he took in his care is a version of his own past— one he must guide into the future without a fault.
Because everything comes in circles…
This Haruka right now, is in shambles. His form collapsed, his swimming sharp and agonising…
It still holds some of its sheer power granted by his love for the water, but at the end of the day his metamorphosis into a new monster is slightly unsettling to those who loved him from way before.
The inevitable of this situation is not lost on anyone involved…
Haruka’s future swimming will be completely different.
But from now on, he too has found the resolve to accept that change and rebuild both body and soul…
All he’s got to do, is believe.
