Work Text:
crossing
"When the tsunami hit, the cliffs were underwater."
Katsuki looked out the cabin window splattered with dried salt to the rock face undulating like a petrified wave, the sun flickering through the cypress. The boat rocked, propeller sputtering to a low hum, its wake fanning and frothy. Gulls cried from scattered islands jutting and golden in the slipping afternoon. The towering cliffs were smooth and white and painted with tide lines like the dragging of an ancient finger dipped in charcoal, casting the boat in their shadow. Trees curled from crevices, roots wedged, new spring leaves bristling.
Where the wall met the sea was cracked with a narrow, dark fissure, like the split of a chisel. The waves broke in shrapnel bursts and surged inside, rushed back out in a heaving swell as though the rock breathed. The ocean echoed in the tunnel, reflections erupting at its lip.
"A few towns north you can walk around deep-sea rocks it brought up, if that's the sort of thing you're documenting."
Katsuki grunted and zipped his rain shell, cinched the cuffs, pulled back to the fracture in the stone.
"You're sure I can leave you here?"
"We meet this side of the cove in two days, as agreed."
A shrug, a wary glance. "Be careful, everything's eroding. The public isn't allowed out this way anymore."
Katsuki slung his pack on, buckling the straps. The boat lurched as he ducked onto deck, the engine rumbling beneath his boots, hull slapping the sea. He unhitched his kayak from the cabin roof and slipped into the cockpit off starboard as the captain passed over the paddle.
A low groan echoed and they both looked to the passage. Wind funneled through the maw, the wail dithering in the dark gash, humming like the held note of a string. An old noise, awakened.
A warning.
"You know the stories?"
"They're why I'm here."
"Two days, I'll wait at first low tide. You can't get out once it starts to rise," the captain said, a tight hold on the shock cords to keep him from drifting.
Katsuki passed a card over the railing. "If I don't show up, call that number."
He tucked it away, patting it in reassurance—though for whom, Katsuki wouldn't guess. "You seem competent. Not really the type to chase demons," he said, letting go. "The tsunami took, but it also dredged. Brought up things that should've stayed down there. Just remember your place, or it'll take you, too."
Katsuki bowed in thanks and tapped the paddle against the hull to push off. A few powerful strokes and he was skimming toward the cliff, the tunnel beckoning. The boat engine burst to life behind him, a sloshing wake rocking, a receding sputter. Katsuki glanced over his shoulder at the shrinking ship, the gilded hour doing nothing to ward off the chilled bite of saltwater. The hollow core of the kayak thudded against the chop. He tensed his legs to steady it.
He hovered near the entrance, sweat building beneath waterproof layers, watching the rush of the ocean sucked into the rift. On the next lull he surged forward with the wave, facing down the dark, swallowed into the throat.
Rock flew by, aching to scalp, curses lost in the roar confined to a passageway no wider than he was tall. The beam of his headlamp scattered against the slick walls, every ridge turned canyon, every pebble a boulder. The sea tried to push him back out, fought him. A porthole of light glowing emerald and blinding, and Katsuki was spat out like he was a shred of food caught in a giant's teeth.
With succinct strokes he slowed in a spin, bobbing in the gargle, peeling away from the turbulence. Heaving, he paddled tender through the softening water. Cautious eyes roved the tall cliffs, the rocky shore, the crisp sea. The cove was an enclosed, calm bowl, turquoise and clear down to the white shingle. It sloped away from the shore, fish lazing where cobalt met the hard bastion of the cliff.
He'd studied the updated maps and pinned the pile of settled debris forming an immovable wall. What had once been the narrow inlet was blocked with fallen rock, making the slivered tunnel Katsuki had shot through the cove's only entrance above the surface. The new fortification was plaited with seaweed and mussels where the tide rose, darkened with algae. The lip was ragged and sun-bleached, spattered with old roosts. Three jizo sat in a notched recess with faded red caps.
It was quiet, the ocean winds kept out but for the old groaning of the tunnel, the deluge bursting like a kid blowing through a straw.
Katsuki dragged the kayak ashore above the wrack line, searching for a place to establish camp on the rocky beach. He'd have to clear debris and brush, but it was flat enough beyond the largest boulders—deposits from the crumbling cliff. He lifted a smoothed hunk of driftwood with a grunt, a flurry of sand hoppers fleeing their uprooted home.
The reports were dated after the initial terror of the disaster, after the search and rescue subsided and the list of the missing became record.
Two children failed to come home while exploring the newly formed cove, so authorities were notified and a search party deployed. They dove for days, combing the pocked grottoes and underwater passages out into the open sea, but never found any sign of the children. Dissatisfied with the official results, the community with their with generational knowledge of the cape and its currents gathered their own divers. Of two, one returned, nonverbal. She drew a trembling picture of what had taken him.
Dark and long, like an eel. Eyes like theirs.
The media descended, ravaged, then left when no one else went missing. It had been over a decade since then, the story a blip in a time when everyone had one to tell, their own harrows to share or keep or take to rest.
He'd had a hell of a time picking up the threadbare trail his mother had last heard, her eyes cast in a gloss, an apology quiet across the kitchen table.
"I should have told you."
Katsuki had only known he and auntie had survived the earthquake and subsequent tsunami, had fled inland and returned to a leveled town. That he'd been able to rally the community, organize efforts to search and clean and rebuild, requested help for a small place easily forgotten in the chaos. He'd always been like that—moral and stubborn and unfailingly kind.
Of course Deku had volunteered to dive.
The ring of steel reverberated as Katsuki hammered the tarp in place. The tunnel breathed, the tide swelled, the sun arced. Sweat gathered on his forehead, beneath his arms. His camp was set, tent pitched, kayak secured, and he unpacked his camera, stalking through boulders scalloped with barnacles and lichen, shutter snapping, observing tide pools and scuttling crabs. White and blue.
If not for the horror, the place might have been a paradise.
If not for the shadow lurking, it might have been a quiet grave.
indentations
Nothing stood out of place as he circled the cove and began setting the route up the inland cliff so he might get an elevated view come tomorrow. He had little time and none to waste. If any of the loony books and archived websites he'd been scrounging through for the past year and a half held any weight, there was only a narrow window in early spring. A migratory route that drew close to land on the way north to richer polar seas.
Katsuki was neither gullible nor prone to flights of whimsy. Didn't believe in the gods he prayed to every new year with two claps and a coin. Didn't chase demons. Ancient weavings between human and ocean made gods of the unknown before becoming modern superstition. Harbingers with crimson cockscombs became wives' tales became surfaced oarfish. Great writhing catfish fracturing the mantle and swallowing the coast became seismic shifts.
But people were prone to stories, myths—a reason for the unfathomable and control when there was none. In the midst of mourning, surviving, sifting through the debris of disaster only to have love and life disappear into calm waters when the worst was thought to have already come and gone, well, Katsuki understood the need for tales. Understood the tight grasp of spirits where the old ways laid foundations like fossils imprinted in strata, the garrotte of memory.
He wasn't sure he'd find what he had come for.
Slumped in his tent after a dinner of convenience store rice balls, Katsuki was recording in a field notebook—the same kind that had been stacked on shelves, filled with detritus and etchings and hot days spent frying in the sun—when a sound broke the methodical lull of the waves. A faint, clumsy glide like clammy skin catching on dry. Like something trying and failing to move discreetly between the crashing surf.
He flicked off his headlamp. The moon was not yet full, a day off, but bright enough to illuminate the tent as his sight adjusted, the shades of stone encircling him like a rite. A rock clattered and he gripped the hunting knife tucked beneath his sleeping bag. The hush of sand slipping. Katsuki tensed like a rod had been struck down his spine, teeth creaking.
He'd read enough first and second and third-hand accounts buried pages deep on forums, listened to old audio recordings, picked apart archaic articles, found every scrap he could related to the incident ten years past and then further back and correlated it all. Always the same description: long and dark, eyes like theirs. Always night, always at blurred borders land and water. Always violent.
A shadow peeled from the stolid stone, slinking closer. His chest tightened like a winch. The feeling of treading in the open ocean, the primordial fear of the unfathomable passing in the depths. A soft hiss, an exhale, and he held his breath as the dark coin of a fingertip appeared on the wall of his tent, pressing, dragging down, testing the taut fabric. The click of his knife unsheathing and the nail hooked, stilled, then was gone.
Katsuki kicked off the sleeping bag and ripped the tent flap open, sprinting after it. Bounding, blade glinting, camera forgotten, a long tail curled ahead of him, slithering between the ragged rocks. The distinct shape of arms, human in their bend, clambering toward the sea before a splash made him skid to a stop.
"Shit," he hissed, rooted like prey hunted.
The water was dark—no longer the inviting, transparent blue. It was ink, moonlight thrown like broken glass on the shattered veneer. Nothing could tempt him closer. Knife in his fist, he toed back, flattening against the rubble, looking out to the opposite curve of the cove where the disintegrating cliff rose a bulwark against the open ocean. He breathed hard, nostrils flaring.
Two white saucers hovering, a dark hole cut through the reflection of the moon. It sunk, silent.
The wind was quiet, the tunnel submerged, and he was not alone.
rising
The sun rose blood orange, wildfire.
The night had been spent in vigil, not daring to offer his back to the sea. He'd not expected to find his quarry so soon—if he'd really been expecting it at all. He'd planned to climb the cliffs, scan the cove from above and explore the stunted forest gnarled over its topside, but his interest was now anchored to the beach.
After a crude cup of coffee to see him through the slog of early morning, Katsuki was draped over a slab of rock looking through his camera, adjusting the lens as he scanned the changing light. Every fluttering feather or cresting wave made him double back. The sky yawned with not a cloud puttering and Katsuki slowly baked like a sunning lizard. Sweat dribbled down his temples, eye socket sore from the viewfinder pressed against it. He worried the shutter, focusing, snapping after a shadow darting beneath the furrowed blue.
"C'mon," he muttered.
His patience—thin by nature—ground to dust and he stood to stretch, joints popping. Several tide pools were carved into the shoreline, threaded with seaweed and snails. Katsuki peered into one and a firework of roaches scurried from between iridescent mussels.
He could tempt it. Might hurry along the waiting game. He surveyed the water, but only fish darted between the ripples. The cast wings of a gull and its grating squawk. Nothing he could see, though that was likely the intent. Katsuki clicked his tongue and returned to his seat with his back to the sea. The feeling of being watched hadn't eased through the night, digging blunt between his shoulder blades, but after only a few minutes spent vulnerable on the rock, it became a hot iron melting his spine down to marrow.
He didn't have to wait long before the surface broke, silky.
He bristled, but didn't turn. "I know you're there." He glanced from the corner of his eye to the gentle lapping, creeping toward his knife haltered at his hip. The glimpse of a variegated fin. "Stupid fish."
A wall of water left him sputtering and soaked and cursing. Another splash, this time like a slap. Katsuki whipped around only to see sloshing foam, whirling kelp, and the flash of a tail. The dark shape orbited the cove, vanishing in the shade of the cliff. He grit his teeth and swallowed the brine in the back of his throat, swiping the stinging salt from his eyes.
It was big.
Bigger than he'd imagined.
Katsuki steadied from heart outward, layer by layer, standing as he searched for a gleam of scales beneath the protective veil of the sea. Every spray against his rock had him tensing, waiting for swiveling fish to turn monstrous. Finally, at the shifting bounds of light, it dipped across and revealed itself for a mere moment, quickly retreating back into the gloom.
"Come out, you're shit at hiding," he called, voice bouncing back. He scoffed at himself, trying to goad it like a child—but it emerged from the shadow and with all the speed of a torpedo, it shot toward shore. "Fuck."
Katsuki braced as the bow wave crashed against his craggy outpost and it twisted to an abrupt stop, writhing beneath fractals like a snake hit with a stick, winding and unwinding in thick knots. Visions of constriction, breath crushed from his lungs.
It burst out of the sea, lunging. Katsuki lurched and fell from the rock with a shout. He landed heaped in the sand and scrambled to his feet, knife bared as it pulled itself from the water. It slunk over the rocks with hands—shit, it had hands—clawing sharp. Thick webbing between each flexing finger. He shuddered and beat down the flaring, primal instinct to run. A coiling rumble like the bellow of an alligator reverberated in his bones. A proud, posturing arch.
It's hair—he guessed—looked more like a knot of seaweed than anything human, and with dull skin tinged green, spotted and rippling like the refraction of light through water, a pale front with a darker back, it was designed to camouflage in the open ocean as much as it was for kelp forests. Sleek and silent with big, dark eyes. An ambush predator.
Like he'd be intimidated by a fish—they were on land and he had the legs. "Oi, ugly, back off," he snarled, all bravado and knife.
The creature showed its own teeth, needled rows curling inward like a sand shark. It slumped out of its arch, slithering down the rocks and toward him. Katsuki slowly backed up against a slab of stone, a hand outstretched as if it would do anything to keep it away, like he was some overgrown fish whisperer. It garbled, pulling lips back fully and opening wide, Katsuki recoiling. A basihyal, light leaking through gaping gills slashed in its neck.
"Got some nasty shit in there." His voice lost its strength, cracking facing the gullet that might be his imminent resting place. Not a chance he'd go down easy.
Barbed points snapped, but didn't make a move for him. The space between them repelled like conflicting poles, but it's bellowing quieted to a low hum, nails scratching, massive tail drooping from its domineering fan. The slits in its face expanded, fronds bristling. The black of its eyes flickered in a flash of green then sank into pitch. Another showing of tiered teeth as it stretched toward Katsuki.
"Stop."
It stopped.
"What the hell," he breathed, rattling. "You understand?"
It chittered with a bob, mouth still open.
"What, wanna see mine?" Katsuki bared all his teeth in a reciprocal display and earned a chirrup, a tail swishing in broad strokes. His brain felt inflamed, like it might burst out of his skull.
Sinewy muscle relaxed beneath rippling scales and the threatening rumble stammered into what Katsuki might categorize as curious—clicks and titters and a quirk of its head like it was listening intently to Katsuki's barely contained panic. A mutual hesitancy outweighed by swelling wonder. He closed his mouth and it mimicked. He made a show of calmly sheathing the knife, hands raised in peace. The tail coiled and webbed hands dug into sand, but it eased just as quickly. Katsuki reached out like one would for a dog, limp and palm down. It stretched cautiously toward the offer and breathed, gills rippling. Close enough that he could see his silhouette bending in dark eyes.
As he thought it might be contemplating the taste of his fingers, the earth jolted with a tremor, and he almost believed it metaphorical. The sea rocked, birds fleeing their roosts in the cliff side, crying as they soared. It whined, tail contorting into a tight knot. A low groan and a crack like the crash of lightning. The cliff thundered as a hunk of its face began to slip, sheared away like a great knife had sliced through it, collapsing into the sea in an explosion of white.
Katsuki was shoved against the boulder hard enough to bruise, frantic hands urging him up—slick as oil, cold—then disappeared. The wave swelled, barreling toward land. He clambered to the crux and curled as the surge roared, inundating in a powerful thrust as the cove folded in on itself. He clung to the stone like a mollusk in a storm, engulfed.
He'd been held under before. A riptide had sucked him from the shore, dragged him out in its undercurrent. Turned him over and over as he tried to swim against it until his vision blurred and ribs compacted. Until hands found him, tore him free, brought him up. As breath was breathed back into him, dislodging the sea that had tried to inhabit every inch of his interior. Wet curls on his cheek, relief in his name, haloed by the sun.
He came up for air, unfurling with a desperate sputter as the wave receded. His hands burned with the scrape of stone, pocked into his palms, fingertips indented with extinct corals. His arm burned with the scrape of claw.
origins
Empty plots of land overgrown between houses with patched roofs and taped windows. Faded nameplates still nailed to hollow cinder block walls. Rice paddies turned meadow sprouting wild poppies. Cemeteries notched into cliffs with thin, clean markers devoid of remains but smelling of fresh incense. Breakers interlocking like jacks creating new reefs, the sea wall striking a silhouette like that of a wave against the rising sun. A migration inland, only just.
Places skewed by time and a childhood steeped in green. The women selling mochi in their doorways. The clattering planks of a wooden jetty and rusted blue-bottomed boats piled high with frayed nets. The steep hills and drops of a bitten coastline, crooked steps lined in camellia and the mundane magic of a fox, urging curious boys higher, up and up. Play battles, bruised and gap-toothed, scalded and bronzed by the all-day sun.
Summers spent together. Cicadas shrieking, clouds taller than mountains, thunderstorms far out at sea. Shaved ice, bloody red, tongues to match. Bowls of pebbles and shells and kite running on the burning sand. A shared bed with the windows wide, the fan droning some small relief in the sticky swelter, wind chimes on the veranda hiding murmurs in the nightlight glow.
Full turnings of the year then reunion in the heat shimmer. Growing fast, learning faster, searing hands behind the boat house, down the shore when the tide slunk, cool caves, dripping, ruddy. Whispers in red ears on tacky lips, feelings and futures.
Then a move and a missed summer, another, and futures changed and feelings hushed. Distance like the space between words left unsaid. Fading like the ease of youth spent by the sea.
Life goes on.
The ocean is still blue.
confluence
Katsuki woke with the sun eclipsed. A silhouette hovering. He bolted upright, knife drawn.
"I'm sorry!"
It hit him like a knee in the liver, and he gasped with the rush of blood from his head. "What the—"
"I didn't mean to frighten you."
Freckled and tanned, salt-crusted curls. An unsteady smile pulling at dimpled cheeks and green eyes brimming with worry.
Eyes like theirs. Like his.
"What," Katsuki rasped, sitting slumped like a drunk on the curb.
"You must've been tired after staying awake all night."
He couldn't hear, sinking as he was. It had changed, but in doing so had become known—it had become him. The smile bloomed. A flash of teeth not quite blunt. The same crook in the corner of his lip, the same scar on his chin from a bad fall, the same nick in his eyebrow, the same point of his nose, the same, same, same—Katsuki's heart solidified like a collapsing star, a dense mass threatening to swallow, to tear him apart.
It was him.
Right?
A tail lifted, dripping and glinting, and he caved into a black hole.
"I'm surprised you took a nap so near the water." He tapped along the stone they were situated on, the same Katsuki had clung to. "It's safe, though, since the others don't come here. Are you scared? I hope not—"
"Oi," he snapped, the dull thud of his fist against rock. The gills fluttered. The tail shivered, scales catching the sun. "Give me a fucking second."
"Have I frightened you?"
"I don't see," he gestured from head to fin, "whatever you are every day."
"I think you have plenty of names for us."
Others. Us. There were more. Every simple trip to the beach would be shaped by that piece of knowledge. He scanned the water, but apparently they didn't come to the cove. The dried blood on his arm flaked, pulled against his skin, wound open though clotted and gritty with sand—like he had passed out, unable to make it back to the tent to tend to it. He couldn't remember. A blank after the erosion.
"Are you hurt?"
Katsuki sharpened. "No."
"I can see that you are."
"It's fine." A quick internal sweep and a feel of his head came up with no other injuries. How much time had passed? He checked his watch, but its face had shattered, frozen in morning. The sun was high, around noon, so a few hours at most. Katsuki dragged his attention along the length of the creature, the gradient in his body from fish to human. "Are you the same one?"
"Of course." Green roved over him in return. "Are you a diver? Most of the caves lead to open water, we can explore together if you want."
"You think I'm a moron?"
A pointed look at his ruined camera. "A photographer, then?"
"None of your business," he said, suspicion knotting in his stomach. It knew of human things.
"You've come looking for us."
He ignored the fish and wobbled to his feet, brushing the grit from his damp legs and ass, fighting back a wave of nausea. The shoreline was still flooded, dotted with new puddles and pools as the cove adjusted to the displacement. The seabed remained unsettled, flurried like a blizzard in a snow globe. A clean patch of sheared cliff revealing rock that hadn't seen the sun in eons.
Down the beach his kayak sat overturned, snagged by the surge and thrown against the rocks. Probably meant his tent was soaked if the water had reached that far. He clicked his tongue. Katsuki slid down to the sand which sucked at his boots, and fish boy followed, slipping back into the water to drift parallel to his path as he wove toward his boat.
"Why are you interested?" he asked from the surf.
"Thought I might find something."
"What did you lose?"
"Never said it was mine," Katsuki muttered. "You're asking a lot of questions."
"It's not every day I get to speak with," he gestured to Katsuki's whole with a grin, "someone like you."
Katsuki rolled his eyes, keeping his distance, careful not to break the boundary set by the lapping waves, followed faithfully by a smoothly cresting shadow darting to-and-fro. It was hard not to stare, his face exactly like Katsuki had imagined—a boy grown. Uncanny, though, with too many teeth and a shine in seaglass eyes like the inside of a shell. The tail.
"What's your name?"
"I ain't telling you."
The folktales were laced with warnings—they'll steal it and keep it for their own. Take your place and walk the land, leaving your nameless self at the bottom of the sea. The thought jabbed, turned his stomach again. It looked like him. Green and spotted like a quail's egg. Stolen. The soft white shingle fanned the dark ouroboros.
"What will you tell me? You're being very secretive."
"And you're being real fuckin' chatty."
"I'd have thought you'd be more eager. I rarely have a tongue, you should take full advantage of it."
"Don't you have any other freaky fish to blabber at."
"A few, but you're already more interesting."
"You got a preference?" Katsuki asked as he grabbed his upended boat with a curse. There were minor dents and scratches, but no punctures. The paddle was still secured in the cords, so at least he wouldn't have to scale the inland wall to get out of the cove.
"I guess, when I have someone from the other world to talk to." A lopsided smile.
Katsuki snorted, somehow made the stranger of the pair. "How many of you are there?" He placed the kayak down and rolled sore shoulders, the wound in his arm searing, each grain of sand needling into opened flesh.
"There's only one of me, like there's only one of you."
"Smart ass."
He laughed, tinged rough with salt and Katsuki ground the heel of his palm over his heart hoping to relieve its breaking.
"Just a handful in these waters. We see more during migration, ones we don’t know," he said with a glance back, as though they were not alone and needed to share a secret. "Will you tell me your name?"
"Quit asking."
"You can have mine."
"Don't—"
"Izuku."
A violent shudder, a megathrust. The axis of the world shifted, spiraling, and Katsuki was sucked into the pit cracked open in his core. He was winded, like when they had fallen from monkey bars onto their backs, wheezing between pitched laughter, like when they had run from the hornet nest accidentally disturbed beneath the eaves of the slanted fishing hut, when he'd learned a small town had been engulfed. When he learned the most important part had remained.
When he learned the most important part had been lost.
Had he found him?
"The others don't come anymore, but I," another wary look around the cove, "I like it. It's safe." He kept reiterating that.
"What happened to the kids?" Katsuki hardened the warble of his voice, trying to collect the rubble of himself. He clutched at his arm, threatening to break open the tender clot. It could be a lie. A trick. Some sort of fish blood ritual—nothing was off the table now.
Green eyes grew thin, distant. His brow pressed like a worry stone, consolidating his silence.
"You don't remember," he mumbled. "Why do you know that name?"
"It's mine," Izuku said, quieter, an uncertain tendril. A tooth snagged on his lip.
"You remember how to write it?"
Scales bristled. "You keep asking if I remember. Remember what?"
"Fine. Do you know how to write it."
"Of course I do," Izuku said indignant, heaving from the water and half onto shore in an ungraceful flop, and dragged eight strokes of his finger through the sand. Katsuki's entire face stung, lungs flattened. "I scratch it into things." Empty shells floating in the current, drifting, deposited on distant beaches like a message in a bottle—don't forget me. "Can you write yours for me?"
"No," he croaked.
"Just a hint?"
Katsuki stared, thickly swallowed. "Do you—" A distant look in those eyes a shade too dark, too light. Something missing, something lost. "Forget it. Why do you look different? Why can you suddenly speak?"
"The moon."
"Of course," he drawled, digging his fingers into his sockets to smear away the pricking behind his eyes, "that explains everything."
"She lets us be who we used to be."
"And are you?"
"Well, I thought so," he said, "but you make me doubt that. I might remember more if you'd tell me who you are."
Katsuki sucked in a breath that felt like his chest was again flooded with seawater. "Why d'you come here?"
"I know this place."
"What happened? To you."
Izuku dug through him, excavating like wind and salt and time, searching for something, anything, but Katsuki gave up nothing. He sighed and dropped his head, sinking into his arms. "It's difficult, like trying to find the surface in a storm." He peered up from the crook of his elbow, tide lapping over his back. "It has something to do with those statues, but I don't know what. Though I have a feeling you do. You came here for me, didn't you? You know me."
"I didn't." Katsuki wanted to crack his skull against a rock. "I don't."
Was it a deception of the sea, a ruse made of foam. It looked like him, sounded like him, seemed to share a heart. There was an undeniably human tether, but how strong was it. How thickly did it wind with memory and whose did it anchor to. The wound in his arm ached with doubt. Had this thing taken him, stolen his face and his laugh and his freckles as a lure, asking for his name with cupped palms like it might be kept like a pearl. Had it dragged him down into the caves and waited for the last pocket of life to leave him, molding itself in his image, a shell waiting to be filled.
What would happen if Katsuki told him, filled him. Shared their childhood, the stories of the marks in his skin, and the meaning of the statues on the cliff. Of the promise he told himself every year that it would be the summer to go back, and how it never was.
A becoming? An undoing?
"I have something for you, stay here."
Before Katsuki could object, Izuku slipped into the water with a powerful kick of his tail and a squall of sand, dissolving into shadow. Into the labyrinth beneath the surface. No light. No air. No one to reach for. No one to pull him up.
Katsuki crumpled, the strength gone from his legs, falling with a wet, choked sob. Held in for years, it shredded through him, tearing up his spine as he ground his forehead into the giving earth when all he wanted was to split it open, to let it all flood out, to finally breathe again. A wounded cry cracked in his throat. It had leeched into every memory, every bit of Deku he held, and into the shape of his absence now distended with the cement of grief.
This thing had seen him, but not known him, and to be forgotten was far worse.
The sea broke, a breath not his, and Katsuki emerged from the fetal cradle of his knees as a long tail encircled him. Wet curls against his cheek, a chin on his collarbone, arms over his in an embrace on the edge of vice. A polished pebble was pressed into his palm by cold fingers like sunlit bronze. Katsuki turned it, thumbing the surface smoothed by the slow grind of millennia spent tumbling in the current. Burnt sienna striated with fawn.
"A rock."
"A gift," Izuku said, a nail lightly tracing the lines of Katsuki's palm around the stone. "Pure red is hard to find, but I looked all night. Please keep it." He closed Katsuki's fingers.
He wanted to put it in his mouth and hold it under his tongue until it melted back to mineral.
From his belt bag he produced a shell once given to him, a spiral flecked with celadon and bottle green and summer earth dipping into ivory interior. Apparently traveled all the way from tropical reefs, or so he'd been told with a field identification guide pressed against his nose. He held it up to Izuku who stared at the little empty home—abandoned or turned tomb, no way out as claws came creeping. Something flickered, was snuffed. Then tears, spilled pearls.
"Sorry, I don't—why," he mumbled, bejeweled.
He felt his beauty in his jaw, tight and hard and jutting.
Was it him?
Was it him?
He wanted to scream. He put the shell in Izuku's palm and closed it all the same.
"Crybaby."
"I'm sorry I can't help you find what you're looking for," Izuku said, smiling, soggy and dimpled.
Katsuki clenched, like he could snare his own heart to stop its thrashing. "Seems like you'll forget soon enough what with the moon playing tricks on you."
"I might." A sad small laugh that tightened the snare into a noose. "When are you leaving?"
"Tomorrow, before the tide comes in."
"So soon." Izuku didn't try to mask his disappointment, wiping the last few tears turned crystalline. He unspooled from around Katsuki, coated with sand and salt, a damp imprint left across his back. "Well," a sniff, shell clutched to his ribs, "until then, can I show you my favorite tide pool?"
Suffocated by fondness, a betrayal of his own making. "Lead the way, nerd."
A faraway look, affection unacknowledged. The world stopped its shifting, settling on its new tilt. Deku had drowned. But there he was. Some amalgamation of recollection and myth, and Katsuki was not part of him—unknown, unrequited.
The eyes of the jizo closed in mourning, smiles soft in pity.
departures
"Will you take a photo?"
Katsuki looked up from breaking down the tent he hadn't slept in. Izuku was draped over a stone, chin in his palm. From the slope of the rock hiding the tail, he might have been human. He looked like he had in summer.
"Of what."
"Me. Us."
I want to remember.
He sighed through his nose, clipping the dry bag. He'd tended his arm, flushed it and wrapped it tight as he and Izuku talked through the night. As he struggled to weigh truth and lie and came up with both palms equal. As he grappled with memory and its changing, like light filtered through water, cambered and dappled and gone too deep.
Izuku both was and was not, both lost and found.
"Fine, but no tail. Not worth the trouble if it ever gets out."
Izuku grinned as Katsuki propped up the tripod, pulled out the broken camera.
I don't want to forget.
Katsuki mimed setting the timer and nudged Izuku as he settled beside him, but Izuku stayed close. Gazing into green glossed in adoration. The curve of lips that had once pressed sweet and clumsy to his. A childish nickname whispered and humid.
"Who was this for?"
He hesitated, turned away. "Myself." He'd thought it might have been for them both. Hoped, in some deranged way.
I've thought of you.
"I'm glad you came."
I've dreamt of you.
Sunken world, land reclaimed.
Where does love go in death.
"Yeah."
Katsuki finished packing and dragged the kayak to the water's edge, paused at the lapping waves. He'd not entered the sea since arriving, an unspoken boundary. A departure from his world since the divide had been drawn. The start of the return, a different form of leaving.
It's safe here.
He pushed in. Izuku hovered where the seabed sank, long and undulating. The boat the last semblance of a barrier and the only way back. Spotted fingers curled over the lip. A face neither here nor there, straddling humanity. But what humanized more than the capacity for love. To know its soaring heights and its mundanity and its grief. To remember. To want to be remembered.
To know love resided in the present, in the living.
"Will you tell me your name?"
we met by chance
once more