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Living as an orca is a simple task. You stick to your pod, you hunt to kill and feed, you protect your podmates at all costs and they protect you in turn. As long as you have a place to belong, you can feel secure.
Surviving alone as an orca, on the other hand, is far more daunting of a challenge.
In order to achieve it, Goro Akechi has lived by three rules:
Anything and everything can hurt you.
Everything is hunger, and hunger will kill you. Eat what you can to survive.
Don't believe in the future. The only thing you can guarantee for yourself is tomorrow.
These three rules he had learned young and lived by. They'd kept him alive for all these years he's spent solitary in the ruthless ocean.
He remembers how he learned each one. The memories are burned into his conscience and he refuses to let the wounds heal over. The day he forgets his rules is the day he dies. And if he dies, his mother will be forgotten for good.
//
Goro was a naive calf.
The world was him and his mother, living in a secluded cove on the coast. He would wake up in her arms then spend the day swimming freely while she hunted to feed them. He would find crabs hiding under rocks, play hide and seek with schools of fish (he was always the seeker, for some reason), and collect shells to show his mother when she returned in the evening, looking ragged but happy to bring her son a meal.
At night, she would put her arms around him and cover his body with her tail. He felt like a clam, protected from the world. He felt safe.
And there, in his mother's protective embrace, he would listen to her sing.
Her voice was beautiful. The way it carried over the currents, each note pitched perfectly, a song memorized over a lifetime. Goro felt the way her love spilled out when she sang. Though there was something else there as well. A deep sadness he couldn’t understand. But it was beautiful, and when his mother sang, the ocean went still and listened.
He found himself singing with her, and soon he knew the melody like the rhythm of his own heartbeat. The first time he sang along, his mother cried with joy. She told him the meaning of the song, that she learned it from her own mother, and her mother learned it from her grandmother. It was a song they all had sang to find their perfect match.
Goro was immediately enamored.
He began humming it everywhere he went. He sang to the shrimp, the kelp, the reefs. He let it echo through the depths as he swam through open water. Each time, he hoped deep in his heart to hear someone sing back to him, someone who might be perfect for him.
He was always met with silence.
When Goro asked his mother if she found her match, something in her smile darkened before it was quickly hidden again.
"Of course I did. I found you, my little clam."
He believed her, then. Because he was a naive calf.
Goro learned the first rule from a sea urchin.
He'd never seen one before then. The odd shape allured him, and he reached out his hand before he could think better of it.
The sting burned. It felt like hundreds of pebbles popping under his skin.
The first thing he felt was betrayal. He had no intention of hurting the thing, and yet it had lashed out and harmed him the moment he got close. He didn't understand why something could be so hostile without reason (Something Goro would find bitterly ironic later in life). Is there something wrong with me? He thought as his lip quivered. He looked down at his hand, at the blood seeping from the hole in his palm where the urchin had impaled him. He couldn't take his eyes off it. The hole was small, but to him it seemed bottomless.
And as every child thinks when they get a wound, he thought, I'm going to die. But that didn't scare him as much as what he thought next. Mama will be so lonely if I die. And that was enough to bring him to tears.
It took little time for his mother to follow the sound and find him, his tail curled against his chest as he held onto his injured hand and wept.
The saintful woman she was, she just cooed as she wiped away his tears. "It's only a little sting, baby", she said as she gently wrapped it in kelp. When she kissed each of his knuckles, he laughed, and she kissed up his arm until she could blow a raspberry on his forehead. He squealed, and the pain was forgotten.
But the lesson he'd learned lingered like the small hole in his palm, even after it closed up and scarred over. He stayed away from urchins, and then anything that was unfamiliar like it had been, until he only played with shells and watched the fish from a distance. It was better that way, he thought. He could be content just watching them play and he would stay perfectly safe.
It was better to be safe and alone.
Goro learned the second rule from his own mother.
More and more often, she would come back to him empty handed. His stomach would rumble and he would whine for food, and she could only pet his head and promise she would find something for them tomorrow. The more it happened, the more tired she looked. When he asked, she would tell him she just had bad luck that day, but he knew better. She was the one who taught him to see things as more than they appeared, after all. And when his mother appeared at night, she would be sporting a new set of scratches and bite marks on her skin. He saw the way she would wince when he embraced her too tightly, how her tail was stiffer when she swam, and how much harder it was becoming to smile for him every day.
Soon, it wasn't only food that he was left craving. His mother would fall asleep sooner, and without taking the time to put him to bed. The first night it happened, he tried to push himself into her arms, only for her to turn to face away from him. He had to learn how to fall asleep with only his own warmth. He sang her song under his breath as a lullaby until his body was too heavy to stay awake.
Eventually she wouldn't return at all until late at night, when Goro had already curled up in the corner of their cave. He wouldn't look up to greet her. And when she'd assume he was fast asleep, he could hear her weeping quietly to herself.
The gnawing in his chest he felt as she drew further away from him hurt far more than the pain of starvation ever could, so he would nibble on fond memories of the woman she used to be and try to forget the husk that had taken her place.
One evening, she lifted him into her arms for the first time in months. Sat him in her lap and ran her fingers through his hair.
"Do you hate me, baby?" She whispered against his head as he leaned numbly against her chest.
"No, mama," He answered, because he didn’t hate her. He hated whatever thing had carved her hollow. She choked on a sob as she shook her head.
“You should.” She spat out bitterly, and he flinched. Of course, she wasn’t really mad at him, but how could he rationalize that? “Your momma brought you into this awful world. Your momma made you beautiful, and that’s the worst thing you can be.”
Goro couldn’t think of anything to say, so he didn’t. He sat there in silence as she tightened the hand in his hair into a fist. He ignored the pain in his scalp as she clutched him tightly, as if he was the only thing holding her together.
He realized then, that his mother was starving, too. And neither of them knew how to feed each other anymore.
The third and final rule, the one that etched itself into Goro's heart and gripped him like a vice, he learned from a bunch of complete strangers.
It happened so quickly. He was fidgeting with shells in front of their cave when his mother suddenly appeared and snatched him up, pressing him against her chest as she raced into the back of their cave. Her breathing came heavily, and he remembered clearly the wild look in her eyes. Fear unlike he had ever seen before.
She had set him down and gripped his shoulders tightly, looking into his eyes with a desperate air that seized his throat.
"Baby, I need you to promise me something." She said, her voice barely a rasping whisper. "Promise me, my little clam, that no matter what happens, you never stop swimming. You keep swimming away, no matter how far it takes you-"
Outside the cavern, the sounds of yelling overtook her whispers.
"Get back out here, you bitch!"
"You aren't getting away this time!"
Her eyes widened. He felt sick. What was happening? Who was outside? Why was she so afraid? His mind raced trying to make sense of her words. Everything felt so, so wrong.
She squeezed his shoulders again as the shouting grew louder. "Please, promise me that. For mommy, please?" He nodded, even though he didn't understand. Her smile was the saddest he'd ever seen, and he hugged him tightly one last time. "Thank you, baby. And never forget that your momma loves you. I love you so much, my little clam."
Oh. He thought. Because he finally realized. She's saying goodbye.
His heart welled up and threatened to choke him. No, she couldn't leave him. He couldn't lose her. No. No! But she was already pushing him into the small alcove behind a pile of rocks. The tight space led into a tunnel that opened into the reef. If he was quick enough, he would be gone before they noticed him. He bit down hard on his lip as he turned away from his mother and started swimming.
The rest of it happened so quickly. He heard her screams echo down the cave as those strangers who had already taken everything from her stole away her life as well. Tears burned in his eyes and he had to fight down the urge to be sick as he pushed every muscle in his body to keep going. Don't look back, he repeated to himself over and over until the blood rushing in his ears drowned out the sounds of the strangers cackling far behind him.
And as he swam, the ache of his muscles and his heart reached into his chest and gripped. And as it gripped it burned. It burned so brightly that Goro could feel the flames licking behind his own eyes. These strangers had to be the ones who had been slowly eating away at her. The vultures that had picked her down to the bone for months and left that empty shell behind. The reason he was left sleeping cold and alone each night. They had killed the mother he loved long ago and now they had come to kill her ghost as well.
It burned. And Goro was angry. Oh, he was angry.
He broke through the light at the end of the cavern and tumbled out, kicking up sand and gravel as he collided with the ground in a pathetic heap. He sat there clinging to the ocean floor for a few moments until the adrenaline seeped out of his body and everything crashed down on him.
His mother was dead.
And he was alone.
The choking sound that ripped out of his throat was reminiscent of a dying animal. And god, maybe he was one. He felt like he had died with his mother's cries in the cavern and now he was a husk just like she had been. Sobs racked his body as he was helpless to fight them, nausea rendering him too weak to move. He lay there for hours until he had cried every tear from his body, and then fought with his haggard breathing until his throat was raw.
Hours later when he dragged himself back to the cave, he found not even his mother's body waiting for him. The scent of blood lingered in the water and made him want to be sick all over again, but his body had nothing left to expel.
The strangers had robbed all of their belongings as well, few as they were. There was no sign that anyone had ever lived there in the first place. He considered trying to rebuild from the same cavern, but the longer he gazed at it the worse he felt. And if there was any chance that those strangers would return again, he couldn't risk being there for them to find.
Before he realized what he was doing, he began to hum. Quiet notes that were second nature to him. The melody fell from his lips, broken and severed by the cracks in his voice. And underneath those precious notes, he could hear the sadness that finally completed them.
As his song ended, he let the last echoes of it float away before he sealed it away deep in his heart, never to be heard again. And he turned and swam away.
//
The rest of his life until now has been spent keeping that promise to his mother and following those three rules. He taught himself to hunt on injured prey until he was quick and deadly enough to feed himself without issue. He never stayed longer than a month in the same hiding place, knowing that no place would become home to him like his cove had been.
He never sings, even when the lonely nights urge him to. The lullaby is tainted by death. He can't imagine those heartbroken notes attracting a single soul, much less his perfect match- if there exists such a thing for him anymore. No pod would accept a stranger without a background into their ranks, especially not one that sneers with such deadly venom as he does. And what good is an orca without a pod? Hardly an orca at all, he thinks.
He doesn't need a match anyways. He doesn't need to sing. He only needs to hunt and swim. The only thing keeping him from surrendering to the trenches is the ice cold knowledge that no one will remember his mother if he was gone, and so he must keep himself alive for as long as he can, whatever it takes.
Because Goro was a naive orca. Naive enough to cling to a woman who no longer existed if it meant he never had to live without the memory of someone who once held him like the shell of a clam.