[Fruits Basket] Haru/Rin, #16 Title: Collage Author: Ysabet MacFarlane (ba087@chebucto.ns.ca) Pairing: Sohma Hatsuharu and Sohma Isuzu (Rin) Fandom: Fruits Basket Theme: #16 (invincible, unrivaled) Disclaimer: Fruits Basket belongs to Takaya Natsuki and Hakusensha; English-language versions by FUNimation (anime) and Tokyopop (manga). This piece of fiction is in no way endorsed by or affiliated with any of the copyright holders. Please support the original work! Notes: Set post-series, with some implicit spoilers for the ending. I think this is a map more than a story, with some signposts for things I want to write later, but I like the way it flows. ********** In the days and weeks and months that follow their freedom, they hold on to each other as tightly as ever, rediscovering each other from the outside. It reminds Haru of the way Rin was when she first faced the world after her imprisonment, the way her eyes kept coming back to him despite her determination to handle it herself. But this time it's both of them adjusting, constantly reaching for each other for reassurance while they find their balance. He finds himself kissing her unexpectedly, often, to remind himself that she's really there. He hasn't changed, though, any more than she has. What's new is the irrevocable distance between them, that their skin has become an absolute boundary. Not long after it happens he hears himself saying "Don't hide from me!", half-demanding, startling both of them. The hurt confusion in her eyes becomes silent anger, a pointed glance at the way their bodies are tangled together; she sighs and stops moving, but doesn't pull away. "I'm not," she says finally, very faint, and her voice reaches him in a way her touch sometimes can't. He holds her until they both fall asleep, and in the morning she's still there, watching him. While he takes his refuge in the sound of her voice, Rin finds hers in darkness; she ventures thoughtfully into the brightness of each new day as if exploring an entirely new world, without ever trusting it with her weight. With nothing left to hold her back, she walks outside and takes pictures and holds his hand, and even laughs a little when older people pass them on the sidewalk and give them the tiny, disapproving frowns that mean *young people these days, touching each other like that in public*, as if they were making out in the street like so many Tokyo teenagers do. Occasionally an old woman will catch their eyes and smile a sparkling smile of conspiracy that brightens her wrinkling face with silent approval, and Haru always smiles back, holding Rin's hand just a little tighter. He watches her return to herself in the dark, where no one but him can see her--retreating into a windowless studio to transmute photographs into her slowly-evolving art; dreaming her restless, terrifying dreams beside him; making love with him as if it could all fall apart again any day, at any moment. Time has healed some of the damage left by Akito's repeated abuses, as it healed some of the trauma that was her parents' final gift to her, but traces of it linger in the way she moves, in the ways she doesn't move. She occasionally loses the threads of her own sentences, words dropping into the cracks where she's been piecing herself back together for half of her life. Usually she recovers them too quickly for anyone but him to notice, but it troubles her, leaves her with the same distant look she gets when she watches storms from behind the safety of a window. After the fact, he learns that her mother called her, that Rin went to see her in a teahouse far away from either their apartment or the compound. That her father was there, unexpected and silent. That both of her parents were offended when she recoiled from her father's outstretched hand, and more offended when she didn't apologize for it. Her only expression when she tells him is the look of guilty relief that crosses her face when he suggests changing her phone number. He can't remember the last time a nightmare woke her, and he doesn't imagine it's the comfort of sharing her bed with him. She sleeps like a child left to cry herself out, time and again, until even her unconscious mind learns that no one will answer. His own dreams are emptier than hers--nothing in them threatens him, but he dreams of endless gray streets echoing with only the sound of his footsteps as he tries to find his way somewhere, anywhere else. When he wakes up alone, as he usually does, he listens to the sounds of Rin's early morning routine, breathes her scent off the sheets until his head clears and the lonely ache at the back of his mind remembers that he's not facing the day alone. But sometimes he wakes in the middle of the night and rolls over to look at her, and finds her awake and staring out the window. If he takes her hand she weaves her fingers between his, a gesture too simple to need words, and he falls asleep again thinking that this is what togetherness is, this silent certainty that their joined hands are stronger than the world beyond their walls.