Work Text:
magnetic moon
pulls me to you
with your ocean arms
-
Rintarou never had to search for a weakness.
Rintarou takes one look at too round eyebrows, a too perfect middle part, and a heart too wide — and decides to turn the other direction.
That doesn’t stop Motoya though, he persists. A too bright smile. Too many clever comments, too charming. And above all else: too much love. Too much love for volleyball. For the little things. For the world around him, and especially too much love for the people in it.
Rintarou takes another look, and decides he won’t be the next thing on this list. And he tries, he really does.
Because it’s a double edged sword; it’s not just Motoya letting you plant your dusty shoe prints all over his heart just to walk away after. It’s Motoya twirling you around his finger. It’s you at his mercy, you praying for another helping of his grace. It’s him, flushing you through veins and valves and ventricles before leaving you on the side of the road — and you coming back for another round anyways because despite it all, it felt good to be there.
It’s Motoya and temptation, it’s Motoya and love.
But he doesn’t make it easy for Rintarou. No, never. Not when sleep eludes Rintarou, and he takes a late night stroll. Not when he discovers the unoccupied hotel pool, and decides he’ll sit on the edge, maybe train his eyes to the stars. And especially not when, less than five minutes later, Motoya joins him, like he belonged there all along.
“Couldn’t sleep?”
Rintarou would rather not give him the time of day. Rintarou wants to bow down in his presence all the same.
“Sure,” he says, instead.
Motoya sits down next to him, tucks his legs into a criss cross and looks at the patterns of the water. Calm, illuminated by the lights upon the tile under the surface. A little hypnotic, if you stare at them for too long. Sorta like Motoya. Don’t look too long, he’ll get you. Rintarou won’t, says he won’t, anyways.
(But sometimes, he wonders if he’s already in a trance.)
“Excited to play against Atsumu tomorrow?” Motoya continues, referring to their match against the Jackals set for tomorrow evening. And truthfully, he’s not. Atsumu pulling the strings, no matter how used to it he is, will always require he be on his toes at all moments. Although, it makes the game just that much more exciting, so can he really complain?
“Mh,” he hums, “A little, I guess. We have our work cut out for us at least.”
“Ah,” Motoya picks up a stray pebble, tosses it between his palms absentmindedly. “No kidding.”
Rintarou lifts his eyes up to the night sky, searches for the stars, the constellations, the moon in it’s waning gibbous form. A prayer, a cry for help, a plea — anything that could possibly spare him from being here right now, sitting next to the boy with a halo above his head and horns poking through his hair in perfect contradiction to each other.
But he’s never been one of the favorites. “We should jump in,” is what he gets, as an alternative.
He brings his gaze to Motoya, who’s still staring at the water, but this time with a determination gleaming in his irides that says he wants it to swallow him whole. That he wants to be weightless, unbound.
(Rintarou thinks he’s succeeded at that, already.)
So he doesn’t fight, doesn’t argue. “Yea?” he questions and perks an eyebrow.
Motoya meets his eyes. He smiles.
“I think so.”
And Rintarou’s sure they have rules and restrictions on this, on regular clothes in the pool. But it doesn’t stop them from dropping their shirts and ditching slippers to the concrete to huddle towards the deep end. And he’s more than sure their coach would be pissed if they got in trouble with the hotel staff, and yet he looks at Motoya, his bare chest and his ethereal glow and says: “You first.”
Motoya shakes his head, firm. “No. Let’s go together.”
“What, you wanna count?”
He seems to consider this for a moment. A short moment, yet heavy on Rintarou’s chest from his measured stare as he thinks.
“Don’t trust you,” Motoya says, and suddenly his grin is growing. It pools mischievousness at the corners of his lips and drips, coolly, into the water below them.
“Why not—”
Rintarou doesn’t get to finish.
He doesn’t get to finish, because Motoya grips him by the wrist and pulls. By his hand, they fall.
Rintarou’s enveloped in cold and wet and shock. Not so much betrayal, not so much surprise — it’s a sudden sensation. Demanding, ever present. It’s not new, not revolutionary, but it’s as though the self-made mask has been ripped from his eyes, overwhelming him with light. Overwhelming him with love.
He surfaces, catches a breath. Motoya surfaces next to him, laugh beginning to permeate the air. Such an intoxicating sound, he thinks. It speckles blues and purples in his vision.
“Fuck,” he mutters. More to himself. More to the water. And maybe to any God willing to spare him a helping hand.
“Feels good huh?” Motoya asks, because apparently freezing is good to him.
“You’re insane.”
“And you’re meeting me at the bottom.”
Before the words have even processed, Motoya dives, air bubbles rising to the surface as he falls, falls…
Rintarou rushes to follow, a heavy intake of oxygen before letting himself sink. And it’s not far down, no — it’s no public pool after all — but it’s enough. Enough space between him and the surface. Enough to feel the pressure of descent weigh on his lungs, on his heart, although that may not entirely be the water’s fault.
He closes his eyes on instinct, let’s darkness greet him as his feet make contact with the floor. His arms wave blindly through the water before a hand, tentative, brings itself to his cheek. Fingers feather across his cheekbone, behind his ear. A thumb ghosts across the apple of his cheek.
Look at me, they say.
And Rintarou does. He opens his eyes, welcomes the sting of the water. Because despite it, Motoya is clear. Gleaming blue, from the light below his feet. Caramel hair strewn in thirty different directions, obscuring the horns and the halo. Eyes wide, cheeks puffed—
Rintarou is grounded.
Under the surface of many things, he’s weightless and unbound by the rules of the air. For in the air, Rintarou placed himself out of touch, out of sight. Underwater, he is here. Motoya is here, still ethereal but tangible enough to have. To indulge.
He moves forward.
Here, he can place his lips to Motoya’s, because he can see where it ends. See the inevitable separation, the part where they come up to breath. So he does, he brings himself in and Motoya meets him there. The hand doesn’t come off Rintarou’s cheek, he only uses it to guide them through a chlorine-tinged kiss. A declaration that lives under the surface, that ingrains itself into the molecular makeup of the water, bound by cold and wet and light.
It’s a little desperate, a lot limited by lung capacities and water intake, but Rintarou takes it. Revels in the way Motoya holds him, relishes the feeling of the water against his skin and Motoya against his lips.
They stay until their lungs ache, until one backs away and they rise to the surface, taking oxygen in greedy gasps as they begin to breathe again.
“You kissed me,” Motoya says, finally.
Rintarou lets out a heavy exhale before answering. “You kissed me back.”
Motoya smiles, let’s his head fall back with a small chuckle, a little incredulous.
“Think you could do that, y’know, above the surface?”
Isn’t this all a little hypocritical? Rintarou who sets up the walls, Rintarou who takes them down. Could Motoya be to blame? Rintarou had never considered Motoya in tandem with the principles of inevitably, but perhaps he should have. Perhaps he should have known he would have succumbed to the other’s gravity, eventually.
“Depends,” Rintarou answers.
“Well,” Motoya swims closer, puts himself right in the space Rintarou no longer wants to maintain. “Only one way to find out, right?”
Past Rintarou took one look at Motoya, and walked clear in the other direction. Present Rintarou, sharing the same air with a Motoya that has his hair plastered across his forehead, the moonlight across his skin and blue engulfing his form, realizes he was still being pulled in his direction all along.
Komori Motoya. What a beautiful bastard.
-
(He kisses him again. Above the surface, now. And a few more times, just to be sure.)
-