[Fanfic: Extraordinary You] Snapshots

Anomaly

Note: For some reason, my drabbles keep getting longer and longer... something tells me I'm going to be writing a full-fledged fanfic at some point, hahah. Why is self-control so hard?! I blame Haru and Dan Oh for writing themselves.

This one's for @melus1n, who gave me the prompt "role reversal." Thanks for the inspiration! ;) Since we've gotten so much angst lately, here's something light. It completely veers off from canon and is more like a fun thought experiment/stylistic experiment. ...probably set somewhere during episode 11 (or 21/22)!

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It shouldn't be possible. There are laws to their universe and simple truths that keep things going as they are; and while Haru would be the first to admit the irony of him making such a statement, he's existed in this world long enough to know that some things simply don't happen.

He has agency and self-hood and lines and a role now, but what he can't have, what he can't possibly be, what he undoubtedly isn't is—

—heaving a breath, feeling air rattle in his chest, scrunching his eyes—once, twice—only to find lines of text snaking into one another in time with the pounding in his head.

Haru rubs at the bridge of his nose and then scrubs a hand across his eyes, but it does little to ease the tension woven tight like a coil through his body. Faintly, he picks up the sound of his name, but it's not until a familiar pair of black shoes stop in the periphery his vision that he finally lifts his gaze from the winding characters of his book.

Too fast, he thinks when his vision swims.

"Haru?" The chair before him shifts noisily as Dan Oh deposits herself in it. The sight of her is enough to dull the throbbing in his head to a muted drum beat, and he feels his lips quirk—albeit lopsidedly—in greeting. Her chin dips this way and that, eyes cresting with emotion when she studies him another second longer. "Are you—" Another scrape of metal on linoleum tile. "Haru, you—" Politely, he smothers a cough behind the crook of an arm. "You're sick!"

The denial slips out before he can even think on the truth of the statement. "I can't be," he says, arm dropping back to his side. Dan Oh doesn't look entirely convinced, so he spends a moment longer willing his mind to clear and his throat to stop itching. It doesn't work particularly well—not when his shoulders rack with coughs a second time and he has to cant his head partway when a ringing sounds in his ears. The feeling is entirely foreign, like having his head submerged under rushing water even while he's still up on land, wheezing in haggard breaths.

She spears him with a look filled with skepticism.

"You are," she repeats, leaning forward with brows scrunched in concern. It takes him a moment to register the cool press of her palm against his forehead—and another to blink owlishly at her—but once he does, he doesn't resist the urge to lean into the touch, even exhaling a quiet sigh when she pulls away to wave emphatically in the air. "You're burning up!"

Although he knows the figure of speech, it doesn't stop him from reaching a tentative hand up to his own forehead or looking at it in bewilderment when it comes away, slicked with sweat.

"Were you in a scene with Baek Kyung? I thought I saw it rain earlier, but I didn't think the writer would leave you in that. Did you get caught in that on stage? Did the writer give you a cold? Some kind of flu?" Her hands flutter before him, alternating between his cheek, his hair, and his wrist like a thermometer; and though he'd find her rapid speech endearing in any other situation (and, to be fair, she still is, he amends), Haru decides fairly quickly that he doesn't like the concern that settles on her expression like a dark, anxiety-ridden cloud.