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Keith has a friend who gives him gifts. Sometimes they’re pearls, shells, or other undersea treasures…but his favorite treasures are the stories.
Keith’s friend is a merman, and he is the only merman he has ever met, which make his stories all the more fascinating.
The merman, Lance, doesn’t understand what’s so interesting about his stories. “They’re just stories about my life. I wake up when the whales start singing, my mom chases me out of bed, I go hunting with my siblings…”
“Because I don’t wake up to whale calls, I have an alarm clock,” Keith replies. “Your bed is made of seaweed, and I don’t go hunting in the morning. I go to the fridge.”
“But, see?” Lance insists. “I don’t even know what a fridge is! Your life is so much cooler.”
Keith laughs, and they tell each other more stories. He supposes the fun for both of them is in the unfamiliar, the unknown. After all, they both like a good mystery.
Merpeople can’t read books underwater, speaking of which, so Keith sometimes brings his favorites to read to Lance. He reads a chapter or two in the afternoon, and Lance brings him pretty shells as thanks. Lance doesn’t seem to think they’re that special, but Keith treasures them. He keeps them in a jar by his bed, and smiles cryptically when his brother asks him where he found so many.
Sometimes they wonder what it would be like if Lance could come on land, or if Keith could travel down below. He’d love to show Lance all the mundane things from his ordinary life and watch the merman light up in excitement at each new thing. Lance mostly wants Keith to meet his family. He says they would adore Keith, and have almost as many questions about life on land as Lance did.
Keith once thought that merpeople would have stayed away from humans because they were afraid, or didn’t trust humans. Lance tells him that it’s usually the other way around.
“Most humans don’t want to see us, so they don’t. Not everyone is like you.” Lance smiles, leaning against his favorite rock, tail swishing lazily in the water.
“I’m glad I get to talk to you, Keith.”
They fall in love, and share their first kiss as the sun sets. Then Lance looks at him with sorrow in his eyes, and touches his cheek before disappearing under the water. Gone. He doesn’t return for a few days.
When he comes back, he brings a new gift–a slightly scratched but otherwise perfectly serviceable mini-telescope, likely one someone had dropped one day. He apologizes for not being around, admitting how conflicted he was about his feelings for Keith.
“We live in really different worlds. I just don’t know how long this can last.”
Keith kisses him again. “Right now, I just want to spend time with you.”
He says that, but each day that they meet in their private cove, he wonders, too. Wonders if they can ever truly share worlds the way they are, wonders if there’s some magic out there that could make their worlds one–he a merman, or Lance a human.
Then he decides that until he finds that magic, he’s just going to keep doing what he can to be with Lance as much as possible.
He takes up diving lessons, saves up at his job so he can afford scuba gear. He practices going deeper and deeper, telling Lance that he’d like to meet his family one day. Lance is thrilled, of course, and goes with him on diving trips, showing him his world piece by piece.
Keith gets to meet Lance’s family. They love him, just like Lance said they would. Talking is hard with his diver’s mask, but he loves this family, too, and he wants them to be in his life as much as Lance is. He wants them to meet his brother.
He saves up more, and starts building a shack by the little cove he and Lance like to use. He gets a permit to cordon off the space, so that Lance and his family have their own private pool to visit him in. Lance wants to help, but he can’t move many things or do any of the building from the water. So he helps by singing songs and telling stories while Keith works.
Lance gets to meet Shiro, too. Keith brings his brother over to help with the building, and they meet face to face; Lance’s sharp-toothed greeting to Shiro’s bewildered staring. Keith nudges him for it.
“Hey, be nice. Lance is my boyfriend.”
Somewhere in the middle of expanding the cove, Keith decides he’s not satisfied with just the one pool outside the shack. So he gets creative, working with an architect to put channels and pools all through the house that Lance and his family can navigate through. There are bridges, of course, so Keith can still walk around, but he likes that Lance can occasionally join him in the kitchen or the living room. The merman learns what a fridge is, and he couldn’t be more ecstatic about it.
Lance starts to spend more and more time close to the surface, bringing treasures of his own to fit in the pools. He comes back after hunting, excited that he had found a school of tuna not far from the main cove. He asks for a bookshelf near one of the indoor pools, so that he can practice his reading on his own. He makes a seaweed bed in the pool near Keith’s futon, so that they can sleep close by each other.
Neither of them quite realize what’s happened until, after Lance’s family has dropped by one day, they tell their son to “Not forget to visit sometimes.”
This place has become home, for both of them. They’ve made it their home.
They didn’t need magic. They’d made themselves a part of each other’s worlds, all on their own.