Chapter Text
It is her turn to be surprised now, because it is the next day and the boy is back at the bridge.
Mortals never return to the river if they are lucky enough to escape a naiad, let alone to the same spot. This boy must have frogspawn where his brains should be, or perhaps he is just eager to die. It is all the same to her. Her mouth curves into a delighted little smile.
She is careful, this time; the cunning nature of the fae digs its fingers into her brain when there is trickery to be had.
Swaying gently where she is nestled deep in the shadows cast by the old bridge, she becomes one of the reeds she is tucked into. She does not notice their tickle today. Her eyes, slit-pupiled and yellow as a cat’s, are narrowed on the lip of the bridge where two sandaled feet dangle, kicking so carelessly in the open air that it must be a taunt.
He is back and he is taunting her, and she cannot believe the nerve of this boy. She is uncomfortable and irritated in a way she has not been since the day she sprouted into existence like a water-lily breaching the surface in its hunger for sunlight.
Naiads do not get irritated, they laugh and then they forget. She does not know why she is not forgetting, cannot forget.
The face of the boy is so clear in her mind, rippling though it appeared from her bed of green stalks, that it might as well have been chiseled against her skull. She grinds her teeth and winces at the unfamiliar pressure of agitation at her temples and the hinge of her jaw.
She will drag this arrogant boy into her river and bury him so deep in the mud that not even the earthworms will find him. Then she will forget his stupid rippling face.
She inches forward with her forearms, sliding her belly against slick mud like a catfish. The legs above her swing as carelessly as ever. He is a worm on a hook and he is luring her in and it is working. Unfamiliar feelings roil in the cavity elation has carved into her stomach. If she cannot snatch him from the bridge, she has other ways to coax him into her grasp.
She takes a deep gulp of river water in through her gills, allowing the oxygen taking root in the cavity of her throat to lift her slowly and silently up toward the bridge. Her body ripples like a fish as she propels herself toward the unoccupied edge, the one with no legs hanging tantalizingly off the side.
She may not be able to catch him entirely off guard, but she can still unnerve him, and any small victory against this boy with mischief dancing in his eyes is one she will relish.
She reaches up and digs her webbed fingers into the sun-baked wood and ignores the agonized creaking groan it makes and the dripping and sloshing of river water falling off of her in sheets, heaving herself up until her arms are folded and her chin is pillowed on the warm surface of the bridge. Water continues to cascade from her oil-slick hair and down her shoulders, desperate to be one with its body again.
The boy whirls, a gasp that makes her grin pushed from his parted lips as his eyes land on her dripping alien face.
He is not surprised because she snuck up on him. She is certain he knew she was waiting for him beneath the bridge, somehow, and she was loud as a summer rainstorm as she pulled herself from the river. He is surprised because naiads don't do this. They use their cunning to lure mortals into their grasp, they are not lured by mortals. And he knows that too, somehow.
She cocks her head at him and her hair weeps river-water into a puddle that sinks into the grooves of the wood and spreads out from her like the glistening web of a spider.
The boy stares for a moment, taking her in with his lips still parted in the “o” the gasp had escaped from and that reveals his odd, blunt rabbit’s teeth.
Only his canines are sharp, she notices through the warm thrum of victory his face sends jolting through her body. The expression doesn't last long enough for her to truly savor it, though, and soon his grin is back, even wider than before. The taunting tilt of his corners is gone, replaced with something more genuine that lights up his whole face like twilight.
“Kinda rude of you to splash me yesterday, Fishy. All I did was say hello.”
His voice is the flutter of a hummingbird’s wings, the buzz of a fat yellow bumblebee nestled in the pollen-heart of a flower in spring.
It is light and playful, but comes from a place so deep in his chest that she knows in a few centuries when he is fully-grown it will be a warm rumble like an avalanche. His mouth forms the odd, wide shapes of the language of humanity.
She does not think to be offended at his nickname for her, so hastily given, because a fish is not so far from what she is, and she does not feel the tug of time in a way that would make her recognize haste. Her gills flare.
“You were grinning at me like an imp. You were asking for it,” she shrugs.
The syllables do not flow as gracefully from her mouth as they do from his, and the consonants catch on her sharp teeth and have to hiss through them to burst free into the empty air. Her voice too, does not warble like the birdsong he spills from his throat. It is gravelly like the swirling silt of her home, low and rough as if every vibrating note is being torn from her by long, curved claws.
To him though, she knows it will sound musical and smooth as silk. One of the tricks of her kind.
He laughs, rumbling and warm again, at her comment, unaware of the shame blooming in her chest at her clumsy consonants and her voice like she has swallowed a palmful of sand. She has never taken notice of these things before.
“A bad habit of mine. Can you forgive me?” He looks at her earnestly, his pupils round and reminding her of a rabbit again. She just shakes her head, tucking her mouth behind an arm to hide her teeth.
“No? Oh, well,” he looks genuinely put-out for a moment before he seems to remember something, eyes tilting upward like he means to catch the thought right out of the air above him, “I can make it up to you!”
While she tries to puzzle out what this means, the golden boy reaches into a brown bag slung around one shoulder and starts to rustle around for something inside with hands so lacking in webbed skin.
She uses the time to study him, now in still air that paints a clear image of him rather than a rippling one, and she concedes that he is beautiful like the bridge-maker too. Though, where the bridge-maker was broad and dark, with arms like tree-trunks and skin that shone like carved granite, the boy before her is narrow and pale-gold, with skin like sand tinged golden with the setting sun and hair like the waving stalks of wheat mortals loved to carry around in big carts drawn by horses.
Or, did. She thinks horses have been replaced by the big rumbling things that never draw close enough to her river for her to see clearly.
His round-pupiled eyes are blue-green like seawater, like her river in the gentle caress of summer that settles the muddy floor, and little dots that make her narrow her eyes to look more closely brush his nose and cheeks, like he has been painted into existence rather than born.
She would think perhaps he was, if she did not know better. Many things are possible with fae magic, but not that.
She notices also that he is narrow and lithe like a cat, and he glows more like marble than granite. She does not think she glows at all, except for where the sun reflects off her newt-slick skin.
He has found what he was searching for by the time she has finished her study of him, and his arm stretches out toward her, palm open and upturned with something resting in the center.
It is a glowing, sunset sphere, perfectly smooth and round and clear like crystal. It is liquid fire. She drags herself further onto the bridge, her torso flat and scraping against the wood now, to peer into his palm, any thoughts of snatching his offered arm gone with the breeze as quickly as they sprouted.
There is a small, dark thing suspended in the center of the orb, like it is trapped in time. A moth, she thinks.
She has not seen many moths, as they flutter about too quickly to be noticed from beneath the water and seem to prefer dry, bright places, of which her river is neither. Her yellow eyes dart up to his blue-green ones, gauging his expression. It is as earnest as ever, with curiosity curling in the crinkles of his eyes as he waits to see what she will do.
As she slowly uncurls a long-fingered hand, the urge to clamp his wrist in her grip is almost unbearable, but this is the most interesting thing that has happened to her in centuries, and she is not quite ready for it to be over yet. She almost wishes that once this is over, she would not forget. Almost. Her shining fingers curl around the sphere, though her gaze is still trained on the boy’s face, and she lifts it carefully from his generous palm, the deep green of her skin stark against his sand and starlight complexion.
“What is this?” she rasps in wonder as she holds the object to an eye, studying the moth within and watching as the world distorts through the liquid fire when she moves, “some sort of enchanted token?”
She does not much see the purpose of a moth suspended in what must be stone of some kind, if not to work magics. He chuckles at this, which makes her bristle.
“No, no! It’s not enchanted or anything,” his eyes are alight with mirth now. “Just something pretty I found at the market a while ago. A trinket.”
The familiar word settles in her chest, understanding slotting into place with a click. Her sisters take things from the mortals they carry into the river sometimes, shiny things that echo strangeness out into the depths. They call these trophies “trinkets” too, or something akin to it in their clicking squealing tongue.
“Must you drown the mortals at this market to win their trinkets?” Her head cocks with interest, tongue still tying itself into a knot in her mouth, and she fights against a gag at the thickness of it near her throat.
Perhaps mortals are not so unlike her kind after all, even if their language feels like being choked.
He laughs again, the sound barking and startled. “No, we don't drown them. They have stalls where you can buy things.”
She frowns. “Buy,” she echoes, tasting the unfamiliar word as it leaves her mouth. "How odd."
“Yes, buy,” he repeats again, patiently as she mouths it a few more times, feeling out the roll of her lips.
“You trade this,” he pulls a flat, green rectangle from his bag that is crumpled a little around the edges and snaps it taut between his hands, “for things you want from other people, and then they can trade it for things they want, and so on.”
She frowns again, more like a pout as she struggles to understand. “Why would anyone want that thing? It’s not even shiny.”
He thinks for a moment and then shrugs, sheepish. “Not sure, to be honest. That’s just how it is. I can ask my finance teacher about it at school tomorrow, if you want? She’s going to think I’m an idiot, though. We just went over the bartering system like, last week.”
He drags a hand through his wheat-stalk hair, as if he wishes to comb the thought from his head, leaving it mussed and all flopping to one side. Her own hair is still and slick against her back and warming in the sun, and they must look so strange next to each other.
The tumble that spilled from his lips is filled with far too many words that mean nothing, so she just gives a noncommittal nod and hopes she is agreeing to something reasonable. Maybe my-finance-teacher-at-school is the one who created that rectangle used to buy things. She can only hope the answer the boy gets makes any sort of sense to her.
Somehow, she is doubtful it will. She rolls the orange stone between her fingers.
“You never told me what this was,” she grumbles, accusatory at this boy who's frogspawn-brain seems to flit from topic to topic like the moth trapped in the stone. He shoots her an apologetic look and she regrets the thought.
Another first, regret. She is spinning with feelings that she did not know existed. She is drying out on the ancient bridge.
“You’re right, sorry. It’s called amber," he says. "It’s hardened tree sap, and sometimes poor unlucky fuckers like that guy get trapped in it while it's still wet.” Her mind flashes to yellow skeletons down in the depths. This boy will be one soon, trapped in river water that tears apart instead of preserves, and that is a shame.
It is inevitable, though.
“Oh,” she nods her understanding to him. “...Can I keep it?”
“Yeah, sure thing!” he grins. He must love grinning, with how much he does it. “It should be fine underwater and everything, since it's survived this long.”
Her eyes flick up from the stone again, curious. “How long?”
He shrugs again, “Like, a million years at least! Some amber has been around since before the dinosaurs went extinct. It takes a long time for it to harden like this.”
She snorts at his jest and he raises an eyebrow, and she is ignoring the ridiculous word “dinosaur” that contorts his mouth in such an odd manner that it simply cannot be a real word. Silly language.
“A million years, a long time.” She giggles through her teeth. “You do amuse me.”
Millions of years pass in the blink of an eye. Even to a mortal, who must live only a few thousand unless they're unlucky, it must go by quickly with their odd, lively nature and their love for keeping busy.
“I’m not joking!” He squawks, arms folding across his chest in a gesture of indifference.
She marvels at the ease of his movement through the air. She is not used to the lack of resistance it offers and keeps lurching too far forward.
“Not all of us live forever, ‘ya know,” he is saying.
“We do not live forever, either. All water dries up eventually,” she points out placidly, unfurling a lazy finger to point at him. “And still, a million years must be only a few generations, at least?” She thinks that is the word mortals use for their spawn.
He blinks at her. “Most humans don’t even make it one century. We hit one hundred if we’re really lucky, or if we drink a diet coke every day according to this one old guy on my block…”
He trails off, taking in her face which has gone slack with shock. “One century-?!” she yelps. How horrid! It’s unfathomable, living for so brief a time that you could not even witness a tree grow from sapling to goliath. “And some of you live less?”
“Most,” he corrects. “I think the average life expectancy is like 80 years here. Without the diet cokes, that is.” He grins like a fool.
There is a pit growing in her stomach like she is a peach ripened for picking.
“You… your kind, they measure how long they expect their lives to be?” Her teeth dig into her lower lip at the chilling, incomprehensible thought.
“Yeah, why not? It goes up a little every few years when we get new medicine and stuff.”
The molten-honey stone is cooling in her palm, the boy’s warmth fading from it as her river-water blood leeches it from the surface.
“How do you bear it,” she whispers, “counting down the seconds until you die?”
She feels the icy-cold talons of death all around him and she is frightened, like mortality is something she could catch just from being close to him.
He shrugs, unconcerned. “Dunno, that’s just how it is. I don't really think about it, I guess? It would be awesome to live forever, or close to forever,” he is quick to add in for her benefit, “but that's not an option, so I just enjoy life as it comes to me.”
Mortals and naiads are not so different after all.
“And how many years until your death, Boy?” The stone feels impossibly heavy in her hand, weighing her down against the bridge like an anchor.
He shrugs again, another motion he is overfond of. “I'm sixteen, so 64 years if we’re assuming I die at 80. And my name isn’t Boy,” he looks exasperated but she can tell it is just for show. The fae are much more apt at seeing through tricks than mortals are. He sticks out his arm again.
“Gavin Williams,” he states like a proclamation out into the blue.
Introducing himself, she realizes after staring at his offered hand for a moment. The warm hum of his true name settles in her chest and her fingers begin to buzz with opportunity. Humans are strange.
“Shemshenah,” she replies, eyes flashing. It is not exactly her name, but the syllables resemble what she is called in her native tongue, and she knows he will understand.
He knows much for someone who will soon wilt like a dandelion after a day with no rain. He knows the weight of his name and what she could do with it.
She reaches her free hand out and clasps his, and she does not pull him into the river.