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“I should have done this before I left last year...”
Kaoru chucked another old, child-sized t-shirt onto the pile they had designated for disposal. His parents hadn’t been kidding when they said they had kept all of his childhood things in the attic. Unfortunately, Kaoru had inherited the collector’s gene from them, too, meaning that Kojiro and him had to sift through an absurd amount of all the things Kaoru had considered worth amassing in his younger years, trying to determine what was still useful. His first guess was not much – he hadn’t even known that half of this stuff was still around.
“I like it better that we’re doing this now. Since I went to Rome pretty much the day of graduation, I wouldn’t have been around to see all this.”
Grinning, Kojiro presented a picture album, opened on a page where a small Kaoru was holding a cone with chocolate ice cream in it, though most of said ice cream was already smeared over the lower half of his face and his kindergarten uniform. Kaoru tried for a scowl, but it was still a little difficult to even pretend to be mad. His boyfriend had only returned from Italy a week ago and having him around still felt like someone had unstuck a gear in the machinery of Kaoru’s mind, allowing it to run smoothly again.
Kojiro thumbed through the album.
“Maybe I should take pictures of these for your classmates in Tokyo.”
“I will throw you out of my apartment,” Kaoru threatened.
“I haven’t even moved in yet!”
Since Kojiro said it really made no difference where he got practical experiences and there were more diverse restaurants in Tokyo than anywhere else in Japan, they had agreed that he would move in with Kaoru at the start of Kaoru’s second year at Tokyo University. Those were good, sensible reasons, but when drunk one evening on the phone in Venice, Kojiro had also told Kaoru that he’d follow him to the smallest city in Hokkaido if Kaoru asked and work at whatever izakaya would have him, something Kaoru had never dared to tease him about because he took no small amount of comfort in those words. He had no plans to fail out of Tokyo University, but it was good to know that him staying there didn’t matter to Kojiro as long as he stayed with Kaoru.
Kaoru opened another box and gave a quiet groan as he saw the contents.
“Did my parents really store every bit of scenery I grabbed when I was small, too? This better not have started to grow mould...”
“The perils of being an only child,” Kojiro said, chuckling. “I think everything my parents ever did keep of me, my little siblings eventually destroyed.”
He did not sound bothered by the fact. Kojiro had always been a good-natured older brother to his four younger siblings. Kaoru liked them, but had spent enough afternoons in the cramped three-bedroom Nanjo apartment to know he would have gone insane living there. The fact that Kaoru, unlike Kojiro, did not have to share his room with two brothers had been very useful for them as teenagers as well.
There was a box with stones and another with sea shells and a third one with branches. While the first two might at least have been pretty to a child, Kaoru couldn’t even begin to guess what he’d planned with the branches, nor the shaggy grey thing that he uncovered underneath when he sifted through the box. As he picked it up and shook it out, he realised it was the pelt of a small seal. It was in pretty good condition, too, the bright silver growing darker over the line of the back and mottled with shimmering grey spots. He made a face.
“This is gruesome. Why did my parents even let me keep this?”
“Probably because you always threw a fit when-”
Kojiro interrupted himself as he raised his eyes from a bunch of Kaoru’s old books and stared at the skin in his hands.
“What?” Kaoru asked.
“Do you – still need that?” Kojiro asked, his voice strangely blank.
“I didn’t need it the last fifteen years or so, no. Why, do you like having a baby seal pelt around?” Kaoru scoffed. “Are you a hunter now?”
“No, no... I just want it.”
Kaoru shrugged his shoulders and chucked the pelt at Kojiro, who caught it with both hands. As soon as his fingers wrapped around the pelt, his eyes went glassy. As the first tears ran down his cheeks, Kaoru was still staring at him wordlessly.
“Kojiro? What’s going on?”
“I thought you had lost it,” Kojiro said, and his laughter mixed with a sob.
There were so many things that Kaoru wanted to ask that he found himself sit quietly for a moment. “Is this yours?” he decided, finally. He still couldn’t think of a reason why it would leave Kojiro in tears.
Kojiro rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. “Yeah,” he said, bunching the pelt against his chest. “You found it on the shore when you were five, didn’t you?” he added.
“I didn’t even remember I had it. I might have,” Kaoru said. The boxes he was sitting in front of were proof that he had liked to bring all sorts of things home from the beach. “But why did you have it?”
“It’s mine. I mean – it’s my pelt.”
“Do you have sun stroke? What do you mean?”
Kaoru knew he was harsher than he should have been with his boyfriend dissolving into sobs before him, but he was too nervous to be better. The last time he’d seen Kojiro cry, he’d been eleven.
Instead of answering, Kojiro put the pelt down on the ground very carefully before he stripped his shirt, then his trousers. Kaoru frowned.
“Was this supposed to be flirting?”
“No,” Kojiro said. “It’s better if I show you. I mean, I wouldn’t believe me, either. Don’t scream.”
When he had taken off all his clothes, he picked up the pelt again, holding it reverently in front of him for a moment before he moved to cover his head with it.
It took only a moment for the silver and green to begin to merge. As it did, Kojiro’s body shrunk and twisted so rapidly that Kaoru had barely time to acknowledge how horrific it should have been to see him melt away into a completely different form, accompanied by a series of visceral noises of wet flesh moving and bones cracking. On the ground remained a seal, sleek and long, with dark eyes that focused on Kaoru.
Kaoru did not scream. He didn’t even breathe.
The seal closed the distance between them, robbing awkwardly on the dry wooden ground. It – he – pushed his head under Kaoru’s limp hand, pressing his cold snout against his palm. When Kojiro’s body contorted once more and rearranged to that of a human, Kaoru’s hand was still in his hair. The pelt fell off his back. Kojiro grinned wildly as he picked it up.
“Look, it grew!” he said breathlessly. “I grew to match me!”
In fact, the pelt was now that of a full-grown seal.
“What the fuck are you?” Kaoru whispered.
The unbridled joy faded from Kojiro’s face as he forced himself to focus.
“You know what a selkie is, right? You used to like fairy tales.”
Kaoru did. Some of the books Kojiro had been going through should have stories of selkies and onis and wendigos and other mythological creatures from all over the world in them.
He found himself violently thrown back to when they had met, looking at the memory much like someone who had mysteriously learned a new language would look at a text that had been incomprehensible to him before. He could not pinpoint the exact day he’d first seen Kojiro, but there was a series of images and sounds and smells from that sweltering August in his head, all the evenings that Kojiro would wander the shore, kicking rocks in the sand or climbing over the cliffs or standing in the sea and staring out as if he was watching for boats or birds, the salty wind ruffling his wet hair. Kaoru would play with him whenever he found Kojiro during his aimless wandering. Kojiro had never worn any clothes at all, but it had been a hot summer and Kaoru figured his parents just didn’t mind letting him go without them, or he’d taken them off because he didn’t have any swimming trunks and didn’t want to get them wet.
One day, Kaoru had wanted to take him for ice cream up on the promenade, so he brought Kojiro to his mom and asked for spare underwear for him. A bit of gentle questioning from his parents revealed that Kojiro, in fact, did not seem to have a family, or a home for that matter. His mother brought them to the ice cream shop and while they picked flavours, she asked the cashier for a phone book and called Child Protective Services. The fact that they’d ended up in the same kindergarten later was thanks to Kojiro’s foster family keeping up contact with Kaoru’s parents, since Kaoru was the only person in the world Kojiro seemed to know at all. Even later, when Kaoru asked, Kojiro had never been able to say anything about who he was before the day he’d first showed up in Kaoru’s life, damp from the sea and covered in sand.
He’d seemed so honest about it, too. Somehow, the thought that Kojiro had kept the entire basis of his existence from him was more shocking than that he was something out of legends.
“Why did you never tell me?” Kaoru burst out.
“The few times I saw other selkies, they said I should never to speak to anyone about the pelt. They said humans would try to destroy it or hide it if I tell them it’s important,” Kojiro answered, scratching the back of his neck.
“You thought I would do that to you on purpose?!”
“Well, no, not when I got to know you! Though at first I did befriend you to go looking for the pelt in your house.” He looked up at him. “You took it, you know? On the first day we met. I couldn’t return to the sea then. But as I grew older, I didn’t know if I believed that anymore, either,” he said slowly, running his thumbs over the silver fur. “I thought maybe I was traumatised, like the people at Child Protective Services said when I wouldn’t tell them of my past. I figured I made up a story that was nicer than what had really happened to me and maybe it was better not to poke at that too much.” He lowered the pelt into his lap. “I always felt like I missed the sea even when I stood on the beach, but what does that really mean? So I kept it to myself. But I was right...”
He smiled brightly.
Kaoru stared into the box of all the knick-knacks and useless nonsense he had scraped together as a child for now unknown purposes. Apparently, he had also found his best friend on the beach. His boyfriend. But if he’s a selkie...
“If I stole your pelt, doesn’t that mean that you’re forced to be with me? Isn’t that how that works?” he asked slowly, the realisation sinking into his stomach like a pack of ice, nausea gripping him suddenly.
They had been each other’s first kiss, first time, first relationship. Kaoru had always secretly thought it quite romantic that he was still with the same guy he’d started dating when he was fifteen when so many other high school relationships had fallen apart in months. It wasn’t much of a miracle if Kojiro was physically unable to leave him.
“I thought you didn’t have it anymore! I looked for it everywhere when I was a kid, but I couldn’t find it,” Kojiro said, quickly shaking his head.
“Still, I’m the last person that touched it as far as you know... and anyway, I’m responsible for keeping you on land.”
“You were five then,” Kojiro said. “You didn’t do it on purpose. You were just a pack rat.” He grinned, though the expression softened into a smile. “I didn’t stay mad at you. I like my life as a human.” He glanced thoughtfully down at the pelt. “I must have had parents as a selkie, but I don’t remember them. I was always alone. That’s why I came to the beach for someone to play with in the first place. When you took my pelt, I got a family, I got friends... I got you. No skateboarding or cooking under the sea, either.” The corners of his mouth quirked. “There was a piece of me missing, true, but so much more would have been missing if I’d gone back underwater.”
Kaoru swallowed. His heartbeat was only slowly evening out.
“So you won’t return now?” he asked quietly.
Kojiro shook his head.
“To swim, sure, but not to stay.”
“Right.” Despite Kojiro’s assurances, Kaoru still felt a knot in his chest. “But you don’t have to stay because of me. I’m not like those husbands in the tales.”
With one hand, Kojiro covered his.
“That’s not why I’m your boyfriend.”
“Sure,” Kaoru muttered.
What Kojiro said made sense, and still – the seal skin had been in his house because Kaoru had taken it from him. Kojiro had known it had to be here somewhere, or at least that it had been lost here. Wasn’t it still like those skins locked away in secret chests by evil men? Many of those selkie wives in the tales didn’t really know what had happened to their skins or where they were, and they still felt compelled to stick around.
Kojiro remained silent for a moment before he lifted his chin and grabbed the pelt, dropping it into Kaoru’s lap instead.
“By the way, you can keep this,” he said.
Kaoru whipped his head up, staring at him.
“What? This is part of your body-”
“I know. But I know you’ll keep it safe, and you won’t hide it from me, even if we ever had a falling-out. You’re not that kind of person. You would let me go.” Kojiro shrugged. “It doesn’t worry me if it’s with you, so I’m giving it to you. Besides, we’re going to live together in Tokyo.” He chuckled. “It’d end up in the same apartment either way.”
Kaoru ran the pelt through his fingers. He wondered what this would even count as if you tried to translate it into human terms. Kojiro was offering himself up to him body and spirit; marriage was not nearly so binding. Kaoru swallowed again. He’d be the one to start crying soon if he wasn’t careful.
With a start, he stood up.
“Put on your clothes. We can finish this tomorrow.”
Kojiro looked up at him.
“Why?”
“We’re going to the beach. With my dad’s car, we can drive until we find a place that’s not crowded.”
It didn’t really matter if his boyfriend was not human, after all. He would still do what he could to make life good for him, even if the parameters were a little different.
Kojiro jumped to embrace him, still naked. Kaoru put his arms around him, the pelt tight in his hand.
“Maybe the fact that you’re a seal explains your aversion to clothing,” he muttered into Kojiro’s shoulder.
Kojiro laughed and kissed him.
“Now I have an excuse you can’t complain about,” he said.
As Kojiro pulled on his clothes, Kaoru hugged the seal skin to his chest, making sure to drape it over his arm so it would be in plain sight for Kojiro, but Kojiro did not even drop his gaze to check for it again. Instead, he leaned in to kiss Kaoru before he pulled him towards the stairs.