Chapter Text
Mazue liked to go above water sometimes and watch someone.
He was a pale boy, who walked along the beach every morning, collecting seashells.
He looked young, maybe fourteen, about the same age as Mazue. She didn’t know much about him, except that he looked cute. Judging by his pale white skin, she figured he was a vampire. After all, she watched him on the Black Beach, which was an area that vampires seemed to frequent as well as humans. Vampires seemed to be attracted to black stuff, like they didn’t appreciate color or something.
Mazue didn’t get that, because she loved color. She herself was a pinkish hue, with fins tinted purple. Only her eyes were solid black, like all of her kind. It made it easy to see underwater. But she loved the rest of her color, loved blending into the similar colored schools of fish that wove around Mother’s massive body.
Mother didn’t swim, mostly because she rested at the bottom of the ocean. She didn’t so much look like a fish, or even like a hybrid like Mazue and her many, many sisters. She looked like more of a throbbing, coral-like mass that stretched and wove throughout the ocean floor, with many holes and crevices. Mazue, her sisters, and her nieces lived in those crevices, like they were giant cubby-holes. Mother’s only moving parts were countless, squid-like tendrils that mostly only came out to nurse her younger children after they hatched.
Needless to say, Mother was very large, but Mazue would never say so; she might be self-conscious about that and that would be rude to say.
Mother would send her children out to find drowned humans or monsters as food for them all each morning. When Mazue got older, she knew she’d also be responsible for finding land-creatures to “date” as Mother would say. It was important to Mother, so that she could have strong grandchildren, ones capable of going on land like Mazue.
Mazue could hold her breath for a long time, but she still had gills, so she couldn’t stay above water forever. She could last maybe a day or so without water at most. She would have loved to test it, but Mother said it wasn’t allowed. She was too young. Right now, she could only search for food. It was during one of these outings that she saw the boy for the first time. Since then, she would sneak off to watch him, collecting his seashells.
Mother didn’t know about him ... at least, Mazue didn’t think so. Even with her many eyes, she was deep in the ocean. She couldn’t see up to the surface. Or rather, Mazue hoped so.
She thought of defying mother and walking on land to talk to the boy. She knew the human language, of course. Mother had made sure to feed the information into her dreams so she knew more than the language of air-bubbles her sisters spoke in. And she had legs, unlike some of her other sisters, so sometimes she’d think, why not talk to him?
But ... she was shy. After all, he was a nice, beautiful vampire boy and she ...
Well, she was basically a fish with legs. So, she watched from afar.
Sometimes, watching him pick up seashells, she could get sad as she thought about his future. One day, Mother said, the oceans would rise and Mazue’s sisters and nieces would come from the sea to wipe the land clean. Their cities will be washed away like sand in the high tide, and all the greedy land-dwellers would be reduced to chum and devoured as easily as a whale eats krill.
Pretty grim stuff, all things considered. Mazue didn’t like to think about it too hard.
She just liked to watch the boy. Maybe, if all that actually happened, he’d be fine. Who knows?
Maybe he knew how to swim.
... or maybe someday Mazue would get the courage to teach him to swim, if he didn’t.
But for now, she watched.