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Perhaps their mistake had been listening to an old drunkard.
He hadn’t looked convincing. The tavern’s low-hanging lantern light cast his face in a mask of gold - one that did little to distract from the frazzled ends of his blackened beard and the streaks of grey grime around his temples.
He’d hiccupped, slid one gnarled hand around his stein and eyed them both from across the table.
“I heard ye be lookin’ for Yemaya’s cove. That right?”
They had. Ranmaru fixed the man with a half-masted glare and made a show of taking a sip from his own vessel, but Otoya had seen his unoccupied hand drift towards his hip. He rested one finger on the handle of his dagger, the other on a cloth pouch that hung from his belt.
“Maybe.” He’d drawled.
But it was a bit more than a maybe, wasn’t it?
The old man had bared his teeth at Ranmaru’s response.
The very same smirk hides behind the crescent moon that hangs high above the cove. A chipped sliver of topaz against a bolt of black velvet.
Its luminescent cackle cascades down upon sand and stone, ricochets across the walls of the sea cave that swallowed most of the secluded shore, and slithers through the cracks and crevices in its ceiling. It pours through the large gash above the oddly-shaped rockpool at the very back, where the water bloomed a brilliant blue in its presence.
From the inside, the gash frames only a shard of the night sky and a meagre slice of its moon. It looked rather like an eye – as if god himself had bent over to peer through the cracks and watch Otoya pry a last few oysters from the rocks beneath the water’s surface. He folds them into his pockets with the others, collects his tools, and stands to leave.
The phantom echo of the geezers laugh that still seems to ring in Otoya’s ears when his fingertips – both still and shaking – clasp onto one rock and then the other in quick succession.
It snickers as he inches his body along the thin, slippery stretch of jagged stone bordering the outer edge of the largest pool with white knuckles, sweaty palms, and stiff joints.
And it howls when his heel slides out from under him. His knee kisses the roughened rocks with a hollow thunk.
Otoya clenches his teeth and rests his forehead against the cave wall.
Magma writhes around his kneecap and crawls upwards through the veins in his thigh. Hot smoke and ash cloud his thoughts and he breathes harshly through his nose, waiting until it cools before moving again. All the while, it’s just as if he-
As if he can hea-
His spine stiffens, like a sharpened shard of ice had been dragged down its length.
The air is quite still. There is, of course, the gentle rocking of the water in the pools, mere vibrations from where they met the sea but, just above those warbling whispers …
The ending note of a giggle. High-pitched. Feminine.
His head whips around to scan the area behind him.
His eyes dart across the shifting shadows cast by the weathered stone walls, skimming over the silken sheen projected onto their surface by the water below. He scans the circumference of the rockpools scattered like shining splatters of silver over the sand and, most importantly, the one lapping at the backs of his heels as he sits on its edge.
Perhaps their mistake had been not listening to everything the old drunkard had to say.
A tea-stained piece of folded parchment had slid over to Ranmaru’s side of the table, swapping places with a small stack of silver coins that had been drawn from the pouch on his belt. The man had taken one between his fingers and bit down on it, earning an eyeroll from the pirate, before the parchment was moved once more. This time it ends its journey in Otoya’s waiting palms.
He’d stood to leave, Ranmaru giving a firm clap to his shoulder as he did so, only to pause at the low drunken snicker that wobbled out of the old man’s lips.
“You’re sendin’ the pretty one, are ye?” he’d sneered, “I reckon she’ll like him jus’ fine, she will.”
“Oi,” Ranmaru’s voice had bitter edge, “Yemaya’s cove’s supposed to be abandoned.”
“Only ‘cause ev’ry sailor that’s been near it ends up jumpin’ off their ships.” He’d lifted his stein and swallowed what was left in three loud gulps before he’d slammed the empty vessel onto the wood and moved to stand, “Babblin’ ‘bout a woman, they were. Like one of them naval folk. The ones who don’ call in ta port for six or sev’n months an’ start thinkin’ the passin’ clumps o’ seaweed are some bird’s lovely locks.”
Ranmaru snorted.
He stared down his nose at the man and rolled his jaw. After a moment, during which their table companion managed a hiccup so profuse that his spine had jolted backward at the outburst, the older pirate had given Otoya a sideways glare.
Only when he received Otoya’s nod in response did Ranmaru wave him in the direction of the door.
Now, Otoya shakes his head and exhales slowly through his mouth.
His pulse gradually slows to the steady drum that it had been moments before, and he pulls his attention back to moving forward. He shifts onto his knees and shuffles the last few feet to where the walls gave way to soft, dry sand and scrambles away from the water’s edge.
He empties his pockets into a corn-coloured canvas sack, wraps his tools into a bolt of the same material and ties both bundles together with a length of twine. Then he stands, takes a step forward and-
He pauses.
His free hand flies to his chest, patting his upper torso in a sporadic pattern and then dropping the makeshift canvas parcel onto the ground. He turns and scrutinises the area around his feet, lifts his boots to check the sand beneath them, before bracing one arm against the cavern wall and peering into the rockpool just beyond.
His rosary winks at him from a small stone ledge about five feet away from the rim.
He sighs.
He sheds his jacket, boots, and rolls up his trousers to just above the knee. Then he dips one leg into the water and balances it on a large rock protruding from the side, twisting his torso to allow the other to join the first. He reaches his right foot outward, searching for another relatively sturdy piece of stone that wasn’t choked with moss and finally places the very tips of his toes on what feels to be a worthy candidate.
Slowly, he shifts his weight forward, pulling away from the boarder.
With newfound freedom, his left heel skids out from under him, pulling him under the water and smacking the back of his skull against the stone sides of the pool.
The world whisks out of existence before he even has the chance to scramble for air.
* * *
Soft fingertips cradle the side of his face.
They leave wet streaks in their wake as they trail downwards across his right cheek. He attempts to move his head away, but he might as well have tried to lift a cannon ball with only two fingers. He manages a twitch, but his body rests heavy and stiff like solid bars of lead.
There’s sand, caked and damp, beneath him and a soft string of hums whisper over the waves swirling on the nearby shore.
His eyelids flutter and for a few moments the world is a flickering candle flame of silver and black velvet. A photograph slowly bleeding into focus. A few hard blinks wipes the fog from the edges of his vision and hardens the fuzzy lines boarding every shape or shadow. The final result still swims and shivers with every throb resonating from the very back of his skull, but it’s a clarity he can certainly work with.
His rosary is clasped between the hands of a young woman.
It spills from between her fingers like long, unruly ribbons, or strands of seaweed. Her thumb moves in slow, stroking motions over the cross at its centre, the rich black stone vivid against the pale sheen of her skin, much of which was bared to the wandering eye. Her choice of clothing reminds him of the dancers who’d preform at those bars Ranmaru always liked to attend– a bolt of braided cloth wrapped securely around her chest, glistening decorations woven over her arms and neck, and her legs …
Her le-
Well, he can’t exactly see-
Her fingers slip under his chin and his face is angled upwards once more.
She traces the line of his jaw with just a fingertip, like a feather fluttering over the bone, and tilts her head when she notices the quiver the action had provoked in his throat. Her hand leaves him then, and she leans on her elbows by the side of his head.
“What were you doing in the cove?”
Her voice is a chord you might play on the piano. It ripples over the water and whispers through the sand beneath his back.
He opens his mouth only to find his tongue feels far too fat and dry within its confinement and it refuses to be of any use. It lays limp and he stares up at her shimmering silhouette against the night sky, A muscle untrained to respond to how her golden irises glittered with mirth.
He croaks something near unintelligible, but she appears to listen all the same.
“Is that so?” she shifts closer, laying on her stomach beside him. Her free hand ventures over yet again, skates over his temple and brushes into his hair. It follows the hairline across his forehead before coming down the sweep of his nose and pressing against the very tip.
He goes cross-eyed trying to look at it.
She laughs and withdraws it, places it beneath her own chin and his gaze latches onto the drops of water that fall down the slope of her neck.
A curious kind of brightness settles in her expression as they speak, though his responses have the speed and dexterity of an old man. They exchange names, the information she asked for rolling steadily from his lips and his eyes glide downwards again.
“Is that…”He wets his lip with his tongue, “I… I mean-”
Haruka tilts her head to the side. The lower half of her body twists and falls on top of his legs.
She flutters her eyelashes at him.
“You don’t like it?”
“N- That’s… That’s not…” he looks down at the appendage.
Its scales were studded like polished pearls that shimmered in the starlight. A soft flowing fin of the same creamed-milk hue feathered from its end with a shear, near translucent sheen.
He can feel the blood creeping upwards across his neck and towards his face.
“It’s a nice tail.” He mutters. His cheekbones feel rather tight.
Something passes over her face, before a small half-smile graces her lips,
“I would hope so. It’s your dream – I would hate to be the unpleasant entity.”
His brow furrows.
He starts to say no, begins to form the start of another question, but then her hand is over his mouth and he settles for watching with wide eyes as she places his rosary over his chest.
She leans down next to his ear and whispers something – something he doesn’t quite remember – then she begins to hum what sounds like the same song she’d been singing before.
After the first few bars, his mind is nothing more than fog in the night, and he sinks down into the dreamless deep.
* * *
His body jolts.
Someone had taken hold of his shoulder and gripped it hard, shaking him vigorously, as one might beat out an old rug.
“Oi.” Ranmaru’s voice slices through the mist like a streak of steel shimmering in the dark, “Oi, Otoya! The fuck are you doing?”
Otoya’s skull throbs and he blinks blearily up at Ranmaru’s crouched silhouette.
He can’t remember. His voice is slurred, and he shakes his head. The stars seem to swim in the sky above him, switching and swishing past one another, forming shimmering knots and warbled webs. Their patterns are pulsing silver veins in dark obsidian, much like the ones pounding in his temples, driving spearpoints into either side of his brain.
There’s a shift in the sand beneath him as Ranmaru stands and mutters what sounded like a curse under his breath. Then the older pirate extends a hand and pulls him upward.
His knees shiver and his heels skid on the sand as if it were frozen. Ranmaru scoffs and slides the arm he’d grabbed over his own shoulders, allowing Otoya to shift his weight off his own feet.
He thinks his head must have swollen to twice its usual size and it feels far too light. As if it had been hollowed out and filled with nothing but air, like one of those leather balls he’d kick around the street as a child.
Ranmaru has to remind him to keep moving his legs as they walk, unless he wanted to be dragged back to the ship.
But even in such a state, even as the horizon tilts and twists like a raft caught in the swirl of a storm, Otoya still catches his senior narrowing his eyes at the right-hand side of his neck.
He makes a point of checking that patch of skin in the mirror just before he turns in that night.
But there’s nothing there, so he thinks nothing of it.
* * *
He has the same dream the following night.
But this time Haruka’s hands are threading through his hair and her mouth traces his jaw and he’s lying flat against the boards of that old dock they’d moored at for the evening.
The night after that she sings to him from the side of the ship and when he climbs down the rope ladder to meet her, she lets him run his hand down the length of her tail. Watches him linger on each shimmering scale, studded like pearls onto a living sculpture.
The night after that her hands are under his shirt and her fingertips are rubbing small circular patterns into his shoulder blades.
The night after that she kisses him. She laughs when he forgets to tread water and nearly dunks himself beneath the surface out of sheer surprise.
The night after that. The night after that. The night after that.
On the seventeenth moon she has him pressed against the side of the ship. His legs are wrapped around her and her mouth is against his ear, whispering that she’d had no idea he’d be so loud. There’s a flush heating his cheekbones and he buries his face into her neck when his hips stop rocking and his thighs shake.
But it’s no more than a simple fantasy.
The small, petal-shaped marks along his jaw are just leftover bruising from work the day before. So were the darker blemishes and soft scarlet scratches cascading down his back.
And if not that, then he must have caused them by himself in the dead of night, tossing and turning in his bunk.
Even the scales – the ones he found folded into his clothes that shimmered like chips of mother pearl, the same ones that he kept tucked under his mattress and cradles in his palm when he was alone in his cabin – even those were simple from some other variety of fish.
He insisted so when the other crew members would find the offending objects scattered in his wake like fallen snow, to himself when he lay down at night and examined one in golden candlelight, and especially when he held one against his cheek, its cold ridges soothing to slumber.
One morning, Ranmaru stops him.
The air is clear and crisp. Otoya is leaning on the starboard-side railing as he watches dusty, navy blue waves just begin to curl and twist against the pale periwinkle horizon. There’s a soft vibration in his forearms when Ranmaru lays his lower back against the railing beside him.
The older pirate doesn’t speak at first. He simply glares at the side of Otoya’s head.
Then:
“I asked the merchant down in Canalave about those scales.” Ranmaru turns his head forwards to face the opposite horizon, “He said there’s no fish like that in the whole damn ocean. Offered me five gold coins apiece.”
Otoya can feel the sweat beginning to gather on his palms and he senses rather than sees Ranmaru shift to look at him once more. “Where’d they come from, Otoya?”
Otoya turns just slightly towards his senior. Something about the set of Ranmaru’s jaw makes him think that he’d only be confirming the older pirate’s suspicions.
His bottom lip trembles and he breaks away from Ranmaru’s stare, choosing instead to watch his own fingers weave together in tangles. His brain picks at splinters of words, fragments of sentences, bite-size pieces of paragraphs for some method of phrasing that didn’t sound so irrevocably stupid, but then Ranmaru gently pushes his shoulder with the back of his hand.
And it all just spills out of his mouth.
It’s a waterfall of sound, a fountain of nonsensical babble. He’s no more than a child whimpering about mermaids and magic and dreamworld fantasy. He stutters and ties his tongue in knots, skimming over certain details and explaining others three different ways all at once. He keeps his head bowed and focuses on scratching at the woodwork when his speech finally runs dry and his jaw clicks closed.
Ranmaru’s staring at him. Had been throughout the whole ordeal.
“Her scales are on your clothes. That’s no dream.”
Otoya’s head snaps upwards, wide-eyed and slightly pale.
“Yes, it is.”
Ranmaru’s brow furrows and he points to Otoya’s neck.
“Explain that then.”
Otoya glares and digs into his pocket for his signalling mirror. He fishes out the item and scans his reflection on the glass.
There’s nothing there.
He tells Ranmaru as much, and watches the older pirate’s mouth draw itself into a very thin line.
* * *
“Am I dreaming?” he asks.
Haruka pulls back to look at him.
The water around her is almost like ink – thick and dark. It envelopes her form and makes her pale skin shimmer a near feather-white under the moon. She uses one hand to brush a section of silken hair out of her face and blinks up at him.
Then she tilts her head to the side.
“Do you want to be?”
He doesn’t answer. She runs her palms up and over his shoulders, dragging her lips along his jawline until she reaches his ear and whispers right into it, sending shivers dancing down his spine.
“Do you really want to know?”
This time he nods, wraps his arms tighter around her torso and presses her close enough for him to feel the soft aftershocks of her tail’s movement in his bones. It flicked back and forth to keep them both afloat.
She rubs the right-side of his neck in a circular pattern – the very same place Ranmaru had pointed to – and murmurs a set of words that tug at something in the back of his brain. Something important. But her voice is so sweet and soft, like the strings on a harp.
“Then why don’t you swim with me,” she whispers.
He leans his head against hers and a soft, numbing sensations begins to spread from his fingertips and up his arms. It writhes its way his core, “You’ll be fine with this.”
She bites down on that same spot and a soft burn seems to spiral outward from it. It spins over his neck in webbed pattern and his face falls onto her shoulder. He nods slowly. The full harvest moon had begun to sway overhead.
She coils one arms around his back and uses the other to tease her fingertips under his chin. It’s slick saltwater skin that he tastes for all but a second when she presses the pad of her thumb against his lower lip.
Then she removes it and her mouth is caressing his in a way that makes his chest ache. The feeling of her tongue on his coaxes a low sound from his throat.
Her tail movements slow, the cease altogether.
The water level rises as the sea sucks them downwards in mere moments. It rolls against his shoulders, then his ears, then straight over the top of his head.
Haruka remains still at first.
Then, when the surface is but a glimmer overhead, she twists and tightens her arm around him. In one seamless sweep she propels them both toward the distant seabed, further and further into the deep.
Until he can no longer breathe.