[AQ] Hot Headed [Juon/Keiko]

[Keiko]

Swim practice was some sort of skinship show for Keiko- especially with the majority of the team now composed of fit, attractive, well muscled superhumans with decent personalities. All of these personality traits she wouldn’t exactly stick onto her classmate Corea, however, but she wound up looking for him first and foremost on account of... recent developments. Developments like a shiny new partnership, with sparkling new positions open for the taking.

It was the tail end of the hour and the vast majority of their teammates had already up and left the pool. It was just Juon left pushing a few more laps at his reliably steady but not very impressive pace, and Keiko sat at the edge of the pool with her feet paddling little wakes at the edge of the pool. She was waiting for him to finish his laps, something Juon definitely should’ve been too used to by now, but her typical slightly amused demure was absent from her face entirely. What was left was a brooding mess, with sharper eyes than usual that seemed more than content with glaring down what little sun threatened to hit her from the high windows above. The whole indoor gym was warmed up by it, and only the water surrounding her shins kept her from overheating.

At least she was patient. She would wait as long as he needed to take, but her displeasure grow more obvious as her gentle ministrations turned into the occasional full-on kicks to the water, as if she was trying to get it to splash far enough it’d hit her classmate.

Juon

[Juon]

Burning.

It was ridiculously hot in the natatorium; but the perfectly-tempt water was always refreshing. It wasn't the heat that burned, but rather his muscles, as he churned out stroke after stroke, bobbing up and down with arms outstretched in mighty heaves of the breast. He was overworking himself, constantly doing extra laps after practice; he'd started to have the inkling it was why he wasn't improving, despite all the extra initiative he took to practice.

But it didn't matter; he didn't need to get faster. That wasn't why he swam.

Swimming made his mind as clear and empty as the water he pushed his way through, scooping all his thoughts aside as he did with his strokes and focusing sheerly on the way his body moved, on the turn ahead, on the propel into the next 50 meters. Nothing else mattered at those moments; only the water. Perhaps that was why he always tried to do as much of it as he could. It was his only escape.

Lately, especially, it was one he needed; it was one he'd tried to go home to find, but one that didn't exist there. And it certainly didn't exist here at Seiyo. The more that the scenarios accelerated, the higher his tension grew. And in turn, the slower his strokes became... but that didn't really matter.

He'd done a full extra thirty minutes before finally getting out of the pool, pulling himself weakly out of it and laying back on the deck, only to glance over to see one Mori Keiko.

Waiting for him.

He didn't get up.

[Keiko]

The way he heaved his body weight from the pool and onto the deck like a half-alive beached turtle wasn’t exactly the beautiful sight she had come to expect from her Adonis inspired swim team, but at least he was up. Exhausted, flushed pink and probably sweaty, he clearly looked the picture you’d imagine someone who didn’t want to talk right at that instant. Keiko blatantly ignored that. Instead, she rose up out of the pool and stood over by Juon’s side, poking at his wet and exposed rib with her big toe, signalling for his attention directly that she wanted to talk.

“Suppose you were me, and every time you wanted to have a chat with a dear friend of yours you had to either track him down like a wild animal or lie through enough texts to fool him into coming to see you. Wouldn’t you be sad?” Where normally she wouldn’t had a playful, self righteous smile to go along with her jab, for the moment she only had pulled lips on an otherwise neutral expression, as if she had forgotten exactly how she used to smile so brilliantly. She felt like she had- it wasn’t of a deep sadness, though, but rather of a complicated feeling of unease about being disingenuous.

Even to Juon.

She pulled her big toe back and squatted down next to his side, tucking her chin in a cup made by her palms, and her arched brows were pulled into a tight knot as she considered where to begin, properly. Eventually she thought of something.

“Are you scared of prison?”

[Juon]

"You could've just called."

Heaving a sigh, he sat himself up, abdominal strength feeling too shot to do it without some help from the arms, and even then he slumped over afterward. He turned to look the other in the eye, catching an expression he wasn't wholly used to seeing on her face; he didn't let his stare linger for too long, though, lest it become obvious that he was trying to learn it too carefully.

He did watch, though, as she sat down beside him, taking time and care to sit herself pretty enough before bringing up a question.

It was one that struck him oddly; his brows pushed together a bit, and he cast a stare over the pool with feigned disinterest. What kind of a question was this all of a sudden? This felt unrelated to anything they'd ever talked about--and unrelated to anything in their lives, even. He took a moment to think a little harder about it, though, until it slowly dawned on him while he remembered exactly what kind of person Keiko was, and, more importantly, what his relationship to her was. He hated to remember.

"... What exactly are you planning to ask me to do?"