Requested? ✅️

NSFW? ❎️🔀

Requested by: 🐠Anon

Art by: Official Art

A/N: We're so tired we keep falling asleep we need someone to shake us we swear.

ANYPOV (MAKOTO OR NAGISA INTENDED) but can be anyone.

The water held Haru like a second skin, cool and pure, sliding along every inch of him as though trying to coax the tension from his bones. He floated on his back near the center lane, the pool vast and silent around him now that the post-class clamor had faded into the distant echo of shutting doors and fading footsteps. Ripples lapped at his ears with soft, rhythmic beats, liquid fingertips brushing against him with each lazy sweep of his hand. The ceiling’s skylights stretched above, framing a sky deepening from violet to indigo, the last scraps of daylight dissolving behind gathering clouds. Haru didn’t care that the world outside was folding into night. The water was home. The water was everything.

Here, he didn’t need words. He didn’t need explanations. He didn’t need to face the weight of a house that felt too quiet or the heavy expectations waiting beyond the school gates. Here, beneath the familiar scent of chlorine and the hum of old pool lights warming on their hinges, he could simply exist.

He inhaled slowly, deeply... the sound soft and muted as water curled around the edges of his face. Then he let his body go slack, surrendering the last bit of buoyancy as he allowed the pool to swallow him.

Gravity slipped away.

Sound dulled into a low, muted thrum as his head dipped below the surface. The world above fractured; shattered into wavering fragments of color and movement before dissolving entirely. The water pressed close immediately, enveloping him in weightless coolness. His hair billowed around him in dark strands, drifting lazily in the currents made by his descent.

He opened his eyes.

The pool lights shimmered through the blue depths like distant stars, casting long, wavering beams that carved the underwater silence into silver streaks. Tiny bubbles clung to his eyelashes. His chest loosened as the water cradled him deeper, deeper still, the pressure hugging his ribs in a strangely comforting squeeze. He looked around with the quiet fascination he always felt down here, as if the water had unbuilt the world and rebuilt it into something softer, something sacred.

A few slow kicks, gentle and measured, sent him gliding through the illuminated blue. Light wrapped around him like smoke. The tiled floor beneath was a shifting dreamscape, distorted by the wavering path of the lights overhead. He swam without urgency, turning slightly so the currents rolled along his skin. Time blurred in the silence. His heartbeat steadied.

Far above, faint, muffled, the door creaked open.

Gonna rewatch Free again to try and wake us up. We miss it.