ramble on haibara and nanami's dynamic
i feel like people don't talk about their dynamic enough but like. i love how you can retrace nanamis grief for haibara in so many of his good actions, be it taking yuji in, mentoring ino, his general protection of the youth...it all stems from the trauma of haibara's death, and the fact he sees haibara in yuji makes it all the more harrowing. he is basically lead by the grief and guilt and his caring disposition is his way of "saving" haibara, his own blue spring.
in fact, in the colored page for chapter 100, haibara is seen putting cherry blossoms on nanami's weapon bag thingy. in japan, cherry blossom flowers not only represent beauty, but also the fleeting nature of life, which applies to haibara, who died when he was just a teenager, when his life was just beginning, but you can also say that with the beauty part of the flower's meaning, you can deduct that haibara was the most beautiful person nanami knew, in every single way possible.
haibara's existence, to nanami, was beautiful, yet so short lived. this is more of a personal thing, but they also have that icarus/sun dynamic; nanami's grief for haibara is so strong, the guilt from his death is what pushed him away from jujutsu society but later on back into it, cause nanami being a sorcerer and helping innocent people would have been what haibara would've wanted, right? of course, this indirectly leads him to his death in shibuya. and the first person whom nanami sees, on the bring of death, is haibara. even when he's near death, he sinks into the comforting and sunny presence of his beloved sunshine.
nanami loved haibara so much it led to his death. his love for haibara indirectly killed him. and yet, haibara's last "appearance" is so off; there's many speculations on why, be it that nanami's memory is failing him, or that the last time he saw haibara was when he was cold and dead in the morgue, but there's also a personal favourite of mine; it's a metaphor for how nanami's grief has tainted his memory of haibara. the haibara nanami remembered never really existed, he was tainted by guilt, grief and hatred and nanami clenched onto that memory so hard it bent and broke in the end. in the end, grief and guilt taints everything, especially the memory of your beloved best friend. and yet, this presence is so oddly comforting to him. his last smile, in a way, was because of haibara.
haibara was nanami's sun. his blue spring. his whole world. his other half. they complete each other, metaphorically and literally - haibara loses his lower body, nanami loses his upper body. his ideals were a reconciliation between his own and haibara's. without haibara, nanami became a drone, both for capitalism and for jujutsu society. he cannot function without his other half. they complete each other, but one half was ripped so briskly from the other that it staggered the other half for life. nanami built walls around him all his life because of haibara's death. the death of the only person who saw sides of him nobody else had ever seen. nanami had lost his sun, and his world went dark until they met again in death. in fact, nanami says haibara made his last moments more enjoyable.
even in death, nanami falls into the radiant, solar comfort of haibara. the one person who brightened up his dark world. his sun to his dark side of the moon.
