[Fanfic: Extraordinary You] Snapshots

Threshold

Note: Set during the events of episode 8. Here's a quick take on how new!Haru deals with his rising awareness.

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He can't stand the way she looks at him.

There's a weight to her gaze, a flash of a dozen emotions in a fraction of a second. She's hopeful one moment and pained the next; wistful and forlorn and regretful—she looks at him like she's grieving, and there's no rhyme or reason to it, no logic he can puzzle out from the cryptic words that she offers. He's Haru, and yet she says it, time and again, that he's not. He doesn't understand what it is that she's looking for in him, except that it's apparent to them both that she can't seem to find it.

And why would she?

He doesn't even know her.

Yet, she looks at him as though he should, and they persist in an intangible dance: her unerring scrutiny centered on him and his increasing concern turned outwards on her. She calls his attention across an expanse of distance like an unseen force, both unnatural and inevitable. He can't even remember the first time he honestly saw her—only that once he'd begun to notice, he couldn't stop.

Eun Dan Oh.

She's there in the periphery of his gaze, and in this, he reasons that it's because Baek Kyung's at the center of hers. But the longer he allows his own stare to linger, the more familiarity he finds in the emotions written across her face, and the more difficult it becomes to reconcile the reality that she doesn't look at his best friend in the same way she does him. Baek Kyung asks if it's a part of his character, and there's a terseness to his mannerisms that's an ill fit, too. Had it always been this way between them? He can't recall that, either, and it unsettles him to see the challenge written plain across his friend's eyes.

He's Haru.

But even Lee Dohwa's words ring in his mind in time with the others': same face, different person. They treat him like he's someone else, so he pours himself all the more into being who he knows he is. The reassuring weight of his racket, the surety of the nametag on his locker, the press of a back against his own—

It grates at him, surges tension straight through his shoulders, and leaves him clutching futilely at a bouquet of flowers: with each passing day, that gaze of hers waxes and wanes until it peters out into something like resignation. Even when he recalls the lingering wisps of her attention like sunlight at his fingertips, their reality is far different. She won't even meet his gaze anymore.

It's confusing and disorienting and maddening most of all, and he's powerless to stop the rush of emotions that slip past when she pleads with him to stop. "Stop pretending to be the old Haru when you're not," she says, and her words land with careless precision. Something in his chest constricts, and faintly, he registers a biting pain from the nails he digs into his palms.

"My name is Haru," he says, pushing the words out like they mean something, like he isn't going out of his mind trying to understand what he's apparently lost. He can only look on when she returns his stare unflinchingly, eyes glassy, cheeks ruddy. She says she knows, but there's heartache written in her eyes and shadows cast deep below them. He wants to scream and to shout, but instead, he grabs hold of that urgency and lets it sweep them both up in a minefield of words. "So then why do you keep saying that I'm not? Why do you keep making me worry about you?" His hand lands on her wrist like the action alone might ground him; and she's shaking, or he's shaking, but then he's at it again, frustrated and lost. "Who on earth are you?"

There's a beat that passes between them where resolution eases across the lines of her face and desperation settles in him, filling the hollow spaces of his chest like a suffocating, oppressive weight. "See," she shakes her head, and there's a note of finality to her words, "you're not Haru."

But he is, he wants to argue. A drumming beats behind his eyes, its tempo a maddening beat; and when his hand falls away and she speaks of memories and shadows and an awareness he must have, it takes every last remaining inch of willpower to swallow his rising ire and tamp down on its tumultuous hold on his lungs. He's breathing—just barely—and when Eun Dan Oh speaks again, she spears him clean in two: "Don't remember me," she says, like it's an all too simple endeavor now that he can't stop, "I'm not going to change anything from now on." He can feel the moment freeze on the precipice of something more, something that's a hair's breadth away from an answer he desperately needs—

But then she turns and walks away, and he's shuddering a breath, and clenching a hand, and digging nails deeper before slamming it all down on a marble column.

He can't stand the way she looks at him: not with her pain and her loss and the way it echoes in his chest.

But more than that, it's the absence of her gaze that now, resoundingly, hurts most.