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The water was a swirl of gray, a crash of waves, that tossed Victor onto the shore.
He’d never dealt with currents this strong before.
It was a new stretch of coast, a new tide, somewhere along the North Atlantic that dragged Victor onto the rocks. He cried out with pain as he landed on a washed-up jellyfish. When submerged, they were easily avoidable. But when Victor was thrown atop them…
Victor rolled. His gills felt dry, but he could breathe when beached for a time if he needed to. The shore here was all rocks, all dark sand.
It seemed he had gotten washed into a shallow bay at the mouth of a narrow sound. He could see a bridge about a quarter-mile up the stretch. Perhaps, where the tide had less pull, Victor could navigate a little easier. So with careful diligence, Victor submerged himself into the gray-green water and swam along the sandy floor.
The closer he grew to the bridge, the shallower the water became. But it was dark—Victor was unconcerned. It was rare for humans to be out this late, let alone this far north. What kind of air-based creature would want to deal with the frigid winds? At least Victor had the ability to regulate his heartbeat in accordance with his physical needs. From what he understood, the land-walkers had no control over that sort of thing.
The bridge was low and the moon was bright, and thankfully for Victor, there was a buttress underneath that provided a quiet alcove. He shooed the crawdads away with a gentle swipe of his tail, then settled in between the outcroppings of brick to rest.
He poked his head above the water for a breath of air. It wasn’t too cold tonight, he supposed, though the water here had a chill. It was less briny, even only a short ways upstream. Victor almost preferred the taste.
“Oh.”
Victor’s gaze shot up.
Under the bridge, with a stick of plastic and rectangular block in hand, a dark-haired boy sat on the opposite buttress.
Victor stared.
He’d never seen such dark hair before. Under the water, with the ocean salt, he’d only ever seen lighter, pale tones.
Victor’s mouth dropped open. He didn’t realize why this was a problem until the residual water poured out and the human recoiled with wide, shocked eyes.
Victor shot down into the water until only his eyes were showing. Well, that was… not the reaction he expected. Weren’t they meant to be a little more… impulsive? Angry? Victor’s tail flicked under the water uncertainly. The slate blue scales disrupted the calm surface.
“Oh.” The boy sat up straight again, eyes wide-open behind shiny bits of glass, the kind Victor recognized as new and unseasoned by the seafloor. He wondered what purpose such a thing served. When the stick of plastic touched the rectangular block again, and nothing of note happened, Victor grew curious.
The boy looked up and down quite often, at his block, and then at Victor. He preened a little at that—he’d been told his silver hair was quite translucent and shiny toward the moonlit surface. And, well, his scales were immaculately groomed, if he did say so himself.
But after a time, that curiosity… it drew Victor to things that sometimes got him in trouble. Like this distant shore, for one. And potentially, this boy.
It drew him forward until Victor floated in the water, peering up at him. When the boy looked up from his block again, he startled when his eyes finally found Victor, sank in the water just an arm’s reach away from his side.
“Please don’t drown me.”
Victor smiled, pleased, his face still beneath the water. So, the human knew stories of what he was. Though Victor didn’t personally enjoy a good drowning, he could appreciate a good tale—not to mention, a clever human.
When the water drained from Victor’s gills and mouth this time, the human only flinched a little bit. Victor took an experimental breath, then pulled himself up the side of the buttress gently, slowly, with the rungs of an old service ladder. “Can I see?” He asked, and hoped the human understood.
He was… curious.
What the human showed him was… brand new. Fascinating.
A picture. A drawing of a body and a tail, joined in one long figure. The tips of his shoulder and the upper half of the face was exposed—and the dexterous end of a fin. Rippling water, bending outward all around him.
Victor knew immediately it was something special. “Oh.”
The human jolted when Victor spoke and look down in surprise. “I would give it to you,” the human said, and Victor realized—it wasn’t a boy at all, but a young, mature male. A smaller one than he himself, but not a walkerling, either. “But the ink would leech out in the water. I don’t think it would last. I’m sorry.”
Victor understood, or at least he thought he did. Just like the sand-sketches the merlings drew on vacant beaches, the picture could be washed away with the tides. That made sense.
He frowned, though. Such a strange, beautiful image. Was that how the human saw him?
“Pretty,” Victor said softly, and then searched the words he knew for another. “…me?”
The boy smiled, then nodded. He placed a hand on his own chest, fingers spread. “Yuuri,” he said simply.
Yuuri.
Victor clung to the ladder with his right arm, then mirrored the human’s gesture with his left hand. “Victor.”
“Victor.” It sounded sharper from Yuuri’s lips, less like the crash of waves, more like the drop of a pebble. But that was okay.
It was nice.
“Stay?” Victor asked, and when Yuuri looked back at him, eyes wide, he nodded. Then he stood.
Victor worried if he’d said the wrong thing—hoped he hadn’t said the right word when Yuuri started to move away, until—
—Yuuri clambered down to the water’s edge. He stripped out of his dark over-layer and laid it on the ground. He then folded his limbs under his body and sat.
Oh. That would be much easier. Victor swam to the shore until he was laying in the shallow, sandy water on his side. One gill stayed underneath the water that way, but he was close enough to see what the human scratched on his block.
And the human—Yuuri—drew for him.
He sat there for hours, until the moon was high in the sky. Yuuri drew pictures of the sky, of the land. Showed him other pictures on other pieces of his block. He showed Victor strange things that didn’t seem real and spoke simply, slowly, so Victor could almost keep up. Even when he didn’t, the human’s voice was… nice. Melodic. Victor stayed until he felt the tides’ pull weaken and finally switch—the current was rushing out again. For his daylight nesting, Victor would now be able to escape and tuck himself into the cavern on the far side of the bay.
He watched as the water started to sweep outward, until Yuuri noticed he wasn’t watching him anymore.
“Need to go?”
Victor nodded and frowned. He looked back at Yuuri with wide eyes. “Tonight?”
Yuuri stared at him. Just when Victor started to wonder again if Yuuri understood, he nodded back.
Victor smiled. He slipped back into the water, fresh and cool and breathed deep as he became submerged. It was exhausting, breathing so shallowly for so long. Maybe tonight he would dig a well out in the ground so he could get his gills a little deeper.
It had been a while since he’d felt interested by anything new. But Yuuri… Yuuri was nothing if not exactly that—
—interesting and new.