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The first time Shouto sees the selkies is the night of the summer solstice. There is a certain magic in solstices. The selkies feel it, and so does he. Maybe it’s because of his inheritance, the side he loves: his mother.
Long ago, his father enticed his mother out of the sea. His father took his mother’s freedom by stealing her skin. It was his biggest endeavor, so he took the name. The skin was hidden away, and his mother locked up. Her bare feet haven’t touched earth for years. The window of her tower faces the ocean, and she stares out at the waves.
When Shouto was young, she sat him down next to her and told him tales of his inheritance. He believed them all, even when his father scoffed and cuffed his head when he retold them in a piping voice afterwards. She spoke to Shouto of her long lost love: the ocean. Shouto heard the longing in her voice.
In Japanese, the first kanji of his name means burn and the second means freeze. In the language of the selkies, his name means lost love. There’s a certain sad poetry in that.
His mother never mentioned her stolen skin, only that she had it once long ago, but Shouto knew. It remained lost, but not for lack of trying. Endeavor was clever—he had ensnared his mother, and hidden her skin so well that she never found it.
One night, she pulled Shouto close to her. She whispered that he could never forget. Her fingers gripped bruises on his soft arms. He let her, because she was his mother and he loved her, even as she took one hand with clawed nails and scratched three nail-marks down his left cheek. He screamed as he bled. A reminder, she said, right before Endeavor took her away forever. I’m sorry, Shouto, she said.
Endeavor’s enormous house sat right at the border of dirt and sand. The man didn’t have a heart and therefore couldn’t feel the thrumming heartbeat of the ocean, but something called him to stay nonetheless. Shouto’s brother Natsuo never glanced at the ocean before he left forever, and so did his sister Fuyumi. His eldest brother Touya regarded the ocean with unease and fled. Shouto is the only child left in a house too big for housing two.
He sneaks out at night while his father snores in bed. He tiptoes through the house until he’s out the door and his bare feet sink into the gentle sands. From then, he’s seized by something that makes him run until the water laps over his toes and ankles. Shouto sheds his night clothes and runs naked, letting the cold water of the ocean swallow him. He knows how to swim. Moreover, he instinctively knows the ocean won’t let him drown.
The chill is so unlike his father’s heat: shockingly cold and soothing. The water flows around him, caressing. When entering the waves, he navigates them easily. This is where he’s meant to be.
The moon shines bright tonight, reflecting and glittering in the roiling crests of water. The stars have moved significantly before he hears the song of the selkies as they swim past him towards the shore. He stills and lets them pass, oblivious to the human barely brushing their fins.
It’s a little known fact that selkies know how to sing. Shouto thinks they picked it up from the sirens frequenting the bay and adjusted it to their own language, full of clicks and gurgles and hisses. In this way, they sound oddly like the waves.
He treads and listens. The song’s haunting and beautiful: flowing up and down, around and under. Shouto floats on his back and closes his eyes, letting water fill his ears. The song becomes both muffled and amplified. It’s so beautiful that Shouto thinks that he shouldn't be hearing this, because the song of the selkie isn’t meant for his ears—not in the deadly way of the siren, but because it's intensely private.
He surfaces although he isn’t tired of listening, sensing that he’s drifted far from shore. The chill eats away at his strength, but he’s trained to be strong. He strokes like a frog towards the shore and sees them.
Their skins are laid off to the side, haphazard, but there’s an order and a certain neatness in the chaos. There are variations of greys and muted browns, but they glint all colors when the moonlight catches. Shouto treads quietly and stares, because they're dancing and he’s never before seen them move to a rhythm of their creation.
There's a certain underlying beat to the melody that the selkies move and undulate to. It’s simultaneously unearthly and worldly, in the strange way that a new song played by the wandering bards sounds comfortable. There’s a certain wistful emotion in their song that Shouto recognizes but can’t place.
They sing in a different language, but Shouto somehow understands that this music is for the distant, untouchable moon: the first mother. The selkies sing about the glow of the moon on the ocean, the scattering of its reflection when they touch its image.
Shouto feels tears in his eyes. This is how he feels about the strange call he’s felt all his life: a tug towards something vast that he can’t hope to understand. His origin. His homeland. His mother.
The selkies collectively reach with their song. For them, it’s their first mother. In that, they and Shouto are the same.
Shouto keeps his head low, because his red hair streaked with white is stark against the hues of the ocean. Gulls land near him, fish swim under his legs and nibble at his toes. The water leeches warmth away and his fingers go numb, but he watches. This is a secret. This is his heritage.
The tide comes back in while the night progresses. The selkies finish their dances, the continuous song warbling from lips exposing pointed teeth, and dive back into the sea. Shouto remains completely still. He’s learned he’ll be ignored if he doesn’t move, and they slither past him again.
The selkies are beautiful but incredibly dangerous, and Shouto’s weakened from the relentless ocean taking everything he has to give. He waits until their song fades away. Only then he dodges the waves and stumbles his way back to shore. The shells crunch under his feet and the wet sand makes him pitch unsteadily.
He doesn’t see the single remaining selkie.
Shouto stands naked on the sand and stares. This selkie is male, which is rare. He’s plain for a selkie, without any distinguishing tribe marks or adornments, but staggeringly beautiful all the same. His hair is a dark green that tangles down to his waist. This selkie didn’t dance with the others, remaining hunched and huddled on the sand, silent next to the pile of skins until the others were long gone. Now he sits next to his skin and warbles out his song. He hasn’t noticed Shouto.
This selkie sings of lost love with the tone of wonderment reserved for emotions he hasn’t yet experienced. He uses cliches because he has nothing else to compare. He shares the longing of all the selkies, but it sounds... lonelier. The other selkies are a community. He only has himself. Shouto hears a name full of clicks and hisses on the selkie’s tongue. It sounds secret, special, private. This selkie doesn’t sing clearly, mumbling as though he doesn’t know how. But he perseveres.
He sings for the moon. He sings for the ocean. He sings for himself. He sings for things that are bigger and smaller than everything he knows. He sings of the sad acknowledgement that there’s infinite knowledge in this universe, and the impossibility to know and experience it all.
This selkie’s voice is reminiscent of an adventure. He whistles that there is something more out there. Shouto intimately shares the wish for something new.
The moon shines off the selkie’s cast-off skin. Shouto’s overcome with some overpowering emotion, the need for something more. He needs him to stay. He needs to understand and to be understood.
Shouto steps towards the selkie and opens his mouth. His first note has the selkie startling and shaking. The selkie makes a motion to grab for his skin to slip away, and Shouto steps aside to let him. He’s not his father, but he sings to the creature that is similar to Shouto in mind not body and hopes that he will stay.
Shouto stands across from the violently shivering selkie, and he uses a language that he doesn’t know how to speak but somehow understands. He croons of pain, of long days and longer nights. He speaks of inheritance. He warbles about the draw of the ocean. He serenades the memory of his mother.
His song isn’t beautiful, and he doesn’t know how to sing because he’s never tried before. His voice wavers, so he closes his eyes and keeps going. He finds a rhythm of his own while his body sways. He’s raw and alone and exposed in both body and mind, and he knows the selkie is standing there listening. Shouto has something to say and a story to tell, and he isn’t sure how he knows, but this selkie will listen. This selkie will stay.
Shouto tells a sad tale of a beautiful selkie and the sea and an evil man with four children and one missing skin; the dichotomy of red and white and being born a child torn between land and sea. He whispers of loneliness and the want and need to be understood; of friendship in the same way the selkies sing of the moon. He imitates the susurrus of the calm and vicious ocean. He sings of himself and for himself.
Shouto opens his eyes when he has nothing left to say and everything has drained out onto the sand between. His voice is hoarse. He shivers. The moon has sunk in the sky, and the ocean is darker now.
The selkie stares at him, eyes wide and green. His body is streaked with scars as well as loops and swirls, but so faint. A runt. He opens his mouth, and answers with a melody of rejection. Shouto responds with a line of solitude. The siren joins him, and their voices intertwine. It forms something different. They create something new.
Stay, Shouto sings to him because he is selfish and lonely. The selkie trills an invitation and points to the sea.
Shouto tells him he has no skin. The selkie points at the moon. Mother.
“She passed away,” says Shouto, and it’s the first words he’s spoken, “a long time ago.”
The selkie trills a question.
“She died,” Shouto says softly. “Wasted away.”
The selkie opens his mouth, with his sharp teeth and thin tongue. He says, in a rasping voice unused to human speech, “Mother’s skin.”
“Burned.”
The selkie shakes his head. “Hidden.”
Oh.
“Where?” Shouto says. He’s dry now, and cold. He puts on his clothes. The selkie curiously pads over on unused toes. He touches the cotton and pinches it between taloned fingers. Shouto lets him.
The selkie releases him and mimes a box. Shouto raises an eyebrow. This selkie isn’t human. His ears are pointed and he’s thinner than any boy should be. Still, it’s easy to sing and talk with him. So easy. “And how could you possibly know that?”
The selkie says in a melodic voice, “Selkie magic.”
Shouto can’t help the laughter that bubbles out. The selkie trills in response, and smiles until the sun breaks past the horizon and startles in alarm. He grabs for his skin and puts it on. Shouto waves goodbye. Before the selkie puts the skin over his head and dives into the waves, Shouto says, “What’s your name?”
“Dek—” the selkie says, then stops. His eyebrows furrow. “Izuku.”
“See you tomorrow, Izuku.”
-
Shouto climbs to the highest point of the house, farthest from the ocean—and finds the box. It’s constructed from driftwood and hand-carved with designs of the night sky. He breaks the lock easily, because he was trained to be strong.
He waits through the day. He sleeps, and his father finds him and beats him raw. Shouto bears it. Tonight, he’ll learn to swim like the minnows and be free.
He sneaks out of the house when the sun sets, and the furred skin drapes heavily across his shoulders. He sits seiza on the beach and fiddles with the soft fur, smells salt and must. It’s old and loose; Shouto hopes it will fit.
No selkies show. Shouto falls asleep on the sand with his head pillowed on the skin, and awakes from a dreamless sleep when cold drips on his side. He turns his head, cracks open his eyes, and sees Izuku above him, dripping seawater.
Izuku chirps a hello. He sees the bruises blooming on Shouto’s skin and falls silent. Shouto stares at the ground. Now Izuku will see why Shouto needs to go.
Izuku helps Shouto to his feet. They dig their toes in the sand. Izuku holds his skin in his hands and encourages Shouto to do the same. They step to the line where the ocean meets the foamy beach. The frigid water splashes the seal skin of Shouto’s mother.
Izuku steps into the skin one foot at a time, and it melds to his skin. He puts it over his head, eyes becoming big and liquid and entirely black. They reflect green in the glimmer of the waning moon. Izuku sits down on the sand and gestures toward Shouto.
Shouto tentatively copies him. The skin is smooth on the inside. It feels strangely like home, and in this way, he hopes that his mother lives on within him.
The skin fuses. Shouto sees his reflection in the waves, and his eyes are entirely grey and blue. He has swirls running stark against his chest—unlike Izuku’s, yet they mirror each other. Izuku slips into the waves, and Shouto follows. The waves roll easily around them, and they’re second nature to navigate. The night is brighter with new eyes. Izuku ducks under the water and swims towards the open sea. Shouto follows, at first lagging behind, then side by side.
They surface when they run out of breath, and Shouto sees the moon. He feels different—he feels whole, so he begins to sing. Izuku joins him, and their voices echo and mingle across the waves.