Archive of Our Own

1008 hours.

That’s how long Reigen had before this paper was set to be trialled. He flips through his notes, eyes scanning each idea, each connector, his back-research and plans. He had six weeks before the earliest possible date to submit his paper to be peer-reviewed, edited, and redone in time to make it into the upcoming volume of Blue Frontiers.

Easy as pie, right?

He props open the window and exhales, long and slow, out the window, watching the smoke twist into the sky.

❧

Reigen sat in his office, twirling his pen around his fingers, leaning back in his chair. On his desk were spreads and spreads of notebooks, papers, print-outs, photographs, and plans. He had annotations, notes, sticky tabs— the whole nine yards. He crossed his arm over his eyes, blocking out the fluorescent lights of the office, and sighed, low and long.

“Have you figured out a new place to look?” The voice is small and monotone and coming from Reigen’s couch tucked into the corner of his office. If it had been any smaller, or even any duller, it would’ve faded into the background entirely. Reigen uncovered his eyes.

“Of course not. There are too many places for me to simply run out, Mob. I’m just putting our search on hiatus until further notice.” Mob seemed to be alright with that reply, ever-unreadable, and nods as he looks back down at his homework splayed out on the desk in front of him.

Reigen sighs once more. To say he’s anxious is an understatement. He scans his papers, scans the list of beaches and rivers crossed off, scans the remaining amount that’s slimming down to nothing. He is running out of places to check, he knows. He knows it too well. But he can’t admit that to Mob. He can’t admit his failure at tracking down any single mermaid for a damn research paper.

Scheduled to submit a formal master paper on Mermaid behaviour in association with Human behaviour in the upcoming weeks, Reigen feels dread settle heavy in his stomach. Blue Frontiers will be without his submission in their journal for the first time in years. He had no way to come up with the information he needed; not out of thin air. He still needed to find a mermaid, any mermaid, at least just one. Ask questions, examine their reactions.

Reigen was beginning to understand why the field was so understudied. 

There were only a handful of peer-reviewed, properly published papers on Merpeople at all. They were real, that much was clear, and only a recent development within the last hundred or so years in terms of Academic publication. Reigen’s passion of marine life and come from the end of his Anthropology degree, where he knew he immediately needed to go back and pursue Marine Biology. He did just that, wrote small piece after small piece about Merpeople, about the papers written on them, master docs of all known information— Reigen was the Zhang et al of the Merpeople academia subculture, and now he was coming up short.

Maybe you should just put this one on the backburner. Reigen’s gaze flicks over to his calendar on the wall for what felt like the millionth time that day. He stares at the remaining days in June, counts them, flips them over his mind, before burying his head against the wood of his desk.

His published work thus far had consisted of already-known information. He had reinterpreted many things, come up with theories, presented ideas, but had no opportunity to explore things himself. Now was supposed to be different, though. He was sure of it. He could furtherh is research and his knowledge by contacting a mermaid nad examining, studying, asking questions directly— the only obstacle was how. So far, the only academics who had come in contact had all done it accidentally.

“I have something I’ve been working on if you need something to offer to the journal…” Mob says, and Reigen is so sure he almost seems sheepish. Shy, in his own Mob-way, and the thought makes him smile a bit. Did he have faith in the paper being publish-ready? No, of course not. That was unrealistic. But did he appreciate Mob having the confidence to come up and ask him? A million times, yes. There was a reason Reigen took him under his wing, after all.

Reigen looks across at Mob, who sits at his desk so hopefully, so patiently, and he smiles. “Sure, Mob. Let’s see it.”

❧

June comes and goes. The days pass slowly into July, and Reigen goes without anything into Blue Frontiers. The chief editor is surprised, at first, when his deadline passes and he comes up with nothing, but his usual section is replaced by an up-and-coming academic publishing only their third, and Reigen is happy to see his spot go to someone so deserving.

He’s rounded the kids up for a beach day at Tome’s request. She’d been insisting Reigen takes them all out for something morale boosting considering they hadn’t gone out as a collective in almost six months, which was a considerable amount of time for their crew. The ‘crew’ of course, only consisted of three real employees, one of them being Reigen himself. The rest were Mob and Tome’s friends, who he was now responsible for, supposedly. A proper Sealife and Such workplace outing would only have three people. This was, really, a glorified babysitting job, Reigen realizes, as he’s hauling out two umbrellas to what Teru has decided is the optimal spot for a tan on the beach.

“Hurry up, Grandpa!” Tome shouts as she hauls her own bag of floaties, pails, and shovels out to where Mob has laid out some towels. Reigen is panting, trying not to show how obviously  affected he is by the blaring heat and hauling heavy towels. He digs them into the sand, flops back onto a towel, and lets himself die peacefully in the shade.

“Did Gramps have a heart attack?!” A voice calls from the waterline, which Reigen only knows to be Teru. If he had any slightly better hearing, he would’ve heard Ritsu snicker from his spot near Shou, but, luckily, Reigen is spared by his own humanly faults. Mob drags the cooler into a spot near the towels and umbrellas.

“Do you mind if I look around the beach, Shishou?” 

Reigen moves his arm off from his face and sees Mob, patiently waiting for his answer. His cheeks are red, and he looks a bit flushed, but Reigen can only assume it’s from dragging the heavy cooler across the beach. The body improvement club has really come in handy.

“Go ahead, kiddo,” Reigen says, crossing his arm back over his eyes and blocking out the light. “Just don’t get hurt, kay?”

Mob gives no answer. Reigen assumes he must have nodded, but peeks out from under his arm anyways to see him wandering off towards the far left of the beach towards a tall piling of rocks. He covers his eyes again and settles into the sand, listening to the distance yelling of what sounds like Teru. His ears adjust a bit, and he swears he hears Shou out there, too, before Tome’s unmissable tone cuts through. She’s like a chihuahua, Reigen thinks, offhandedly, before falling into a short nap.

The beach day goes arguably well, despite their supervision being minimal while Reigen is napping. He’s not too worried. With all-but-Tome being incredibly strong psychic kids, he knows they are fully capable of watching over themselves. When Reigen wakes up, he notes that, most importantly, the kids haven’t graffitied his face. They’re still out at the water, save for Ritsu. He’s lying down on a towel next to him, face in his arms as he lies on his stomach. Reigen grunts and pushes himself up into a stand, rubbing his eyes and running two hands through his hair.

He scans the group of kids for Mob, who seems to still be gone. A pang of worry hits his chest— he’s okay, right? I mean, surely, Mob is okay. He’s almost destroyed all of the city before, he’d be fine right now, yeah?

Reigen starts walking towards the left of the beach. It was loosely where he saw Mob wander off to and if that kid was in danger and none of his friends were going to check on him, then he’d be the one to.

He passes the kids in the water. Tome shouts something to him, but Reigen misses it entirely as he heads off towards the pile of rocks far off to the left of the beach. 

When he finally makes it, Reigen quickly realizes it’s not just a bunch of rocks, but they actually curve in to form a small cove. He carefully climbs around them through the water, eyes adjusting as he recognizes Mob sitting on a rock, chin on his knees, as he’s… Talking?

Reigen can’t quite see. The angles all off and there's a small jutting of rock in the way, but Mob’s clearly talking to somebody in the water. Hesitantly, Reigen approaches, brows furrowed, stomach churning.

“Hey, Mob, you’ve been gone for awhile. Everything okay?”

Mob looks about as alarmed as he can be, considering his relatively monotone demeanour. 

“Oh. Yeah. I’m alright, Shishou. Sorry, I guess I’ve been gone awhile.”

“Teru’s wondering where you’ve be-“ 

Reigen cuts himself off entirely as he finally approaches Mob and realizes that, no, he hadn’t been insanely talking to himself in the cove of rocks. There was a person in the water. A conscious, living person, mind the prior wording, but still a person who Reigen didn’t recognize.

And he definitely wasn’t Mob’s age.

It’s only when he says his goodbye and turns to leave that Reigen realizes— holy shit, is that a merman?

The reminder of his paper hits him all at once. He hadn’t touched it in a month and it sat, lonely, in an empty file on his computer. June had came and went so quickly, and he had quite been enjoying his break, but this— this was everything he had been wanting for months. This was his breakthrough.

“Wait!” Reigen calls, one hand on Mob’s shoulder. The body in the water turns to look back, brows furrowed, and Mob looks curiously up at Reigen, who seems almost flustered with himself.

“Sorry— Reigen Arataka. Can I ask you some questions?” It’s all-too reporter-like and academic. He crushes himself for not bringing a notepad (a reasonable thing to bring to the beach, of course), and settles on swearing he’d keep this stored in the bank of his memory word-for-word, bar-for-bar. He had Mob here, anyway, as a witness.

The merman studies him for a moment, eyes raking over Reigen, and he feels somewhat helpless under his gaze. I mean, really, he could say no and spoil his entire paper that he’d been planning for months now. All the work Mob had been helping him with— all for nothing.

“Alright,” The man says, and it’s so, so hesitant, but Reigen jumps at the bit anyway.

“I’m writing a paper right now about humanoid sea creatures, mostly mermaids and mermen. I’d love if I could talk with you a bit another time—“

“That’s the question?”

The sass catches Reigen off guard entirely. He’s snapped out of his explanation, staring down at the male.

“Uh… Yeah?”

“Alright.”

Eyes squint. Brows furrow. Alright to what part? Reigen wonders.

“Alright to which part, big guy?” He echoes his thoughts.

“I’ll talk to you about your paper.” 

Reigen could jump for joy, really. No, he could lasso the sun. He’d stare right at it if he was asked right now. He grins down at Mob, who’s looking right back up at him with his usual stone-faced expression, but Reigen can read him better than anyone else, he knows that much, and he knows by the twitch of Mob’s mouth and the slight curve in the corner of his eyes that he, too, is just as excited as Reigen is.

Reigen learns the merman’s name is Katsuya. They agree on a time to meet again, which is difficult to establish when their time systems work so differently, but they make it work. Reigen brings Mob back to the rest of the group and goes to lay down on the towels, Ritsu now having gone off to build some sort of mega castle with Shou in the sand.

He lays back on the towel and puts his arm over his eyes, smiling.

He has his paper back on track.

❧

Writing goes just as well as Reigen remembers.

He’s able to fall back into the swing of things without issues. He plans pages upon pages of questions to ask Katsuya for when they meet up again. Mob stops by, provides him with some good ideas, talks about his own anticipation, and leaves when he finishes his schoolwork and body doubling. 

When it comes down to their arrived meeting time, Reigen is at the rocks, sitting on the driest one he had find, notepad in his lap, pen in his hand, while he watches the water for Katsuya to emerge. He comes fifteen minutes later than he promises, but Katsuya does show, and Reigen leaves with a notebook full of answers that he hadn’t had before, and a breakthrough paper back in progress.

Katsuya is enjoyable to talk to, he deduces. He’s very calm and relatively well-spoken, a nice balance to Reigen, who is far more charismatic and loud. Though at times Katsuya would trip over his answers, quick to apologize if he said something that might have been offensive to humans, he still remains oddly stoic, in his own way. 

“God no,” Reigen had responded when Katsuya had made an off-handed, (poorly) timed joke about walking and his inability to do so. “You’d have to really try to offend me,” Reigen chuckled, scribbling something down in his notebook before he had looked back up at Katsuya.

Katsuya had already been smiling when his gaze made it to him, though, and Reigen remarked, even only for a moment, that he really was star-bright. Their humour and conversation may not have met on the same level the entire time, cultural differences or whatnot, but Katsuya still had beamed at him, in his own, calm way.

Reigen tucks a paper into his binder and sighs at his reflection of the meeting. They had already set up a second one, and a regular routine after that. He folds a few notes and sticks them into a different section of his binder before shoving it into a desk drawer. He glances at his calendar, eying the days until the date marked in bolded blue for KATSUYA. 

The next time they meet, it’s equally as pleasant as the first, and so is the third time after that. It becomes a bi-weekly routine, and by the third showing, Katsuya is already waiting for when Reigen rounds the watered corner to the cove. The details in their different interpretations of time had evened out and the nitty gritty details had all been flushed through in Reigen’s notes. It only takes a week and a half for their conversations to sway from the interview-like ideas Reigen had come prepared with. Now, as he sits atop his usual rock, he’s almost abandoned the notepad entirely. His knee is to his chest as he talks to Katsuya, who is lying in the shallow water. 

He looks fucking iridescent, Reigen thinks, practically murmurs, really, as he drags his eyes along the figure in the water. Because my god do his scales hit the sun perfectly, with just enough obscured by the water, and Reigen has never seen anything like it before. He doesn’t scribble this down in his notes, though, no— this is for his brain, only. This image is for his own thinking, his own mind to hold, memorize, enshrine.

“I dishonoured my family,” Katsuya admits, and Reigen is brought back to their conversation at hand. Something of a more serious tone— Katsuya is opening up, Reigen realizes, all too fast, and tries to calm his chest. Iridescent.

“It took… It took a lot of time to fix it. To make things alright again. But I’ve worked hard, and there’s nothing more I can be proud of myself for, really,” Katsuya looks over his shoulder to Reigen, who is looking down at him with the most empathetic look he can muster. 

Empathy is, to some extent, in the eyes of the beholder, however, because though Katsuya looks at him and sees someone intent on listening, hanging onto every word, Reigen is only committing it all to memory so he can regurgitate it all into his notebook at a more appropriate time. He cannot wait to relay this to his paper, to outline to Mob how perfect his behavioural dissection was going to go— he’s giddy. Perfectly, completely, uniquely, and entirely giddy.

“Guilt is the first step of understanding you have done something wrong. Most people don’t get past that and internalize it like you did, and even fewer people take steps to fix things,” Reigen says, and pretends to write it down, while, instead, he repeats as much as he can onto his paper about Katsuya opening up. He notes his facial expressions, his movements, his mannerisms, the way he interacts after.

Katsuya seems to deflate at the sight of him writing, though only for a moment. His expression corrects himself and he nods, staring back out at the body of water ahead.

“Do you feel guilty about anything?” Katsuya asks, without looking back, and the question stabs Reigen right in the chest.

Of course he has things he feels guilty about. Of course. But the thought still strikes him and he grips his pen a little too hard. White-knuckles it, really, as Mob comes to mind.

“Everyone does,” Reigen finally says, and closes his notebook.

❧

The first time Reigen steals Mob’s work, he denies, extensively, the idea of plagiarism in its entirety. He’s only borrowing, he insisted, as he typed up a draft of his own with Mob’s paper splayed in front of him.

The kid had worked on something in school and spent six months of the year (including time from the summer before)— an analysis of sea creature life in areas believed to be inhabited by higher-than-normal amounts of Merpeople. Mob had done really well-documented, exhaustive research. He spent hours at lakefronts and oceans, set up reliable means of tracking activity, progress of plant growth, algae growth, took careful consideration of all of the pre-existing temperature conditions that would regularly impact activity at regular intervals of the year. It was all perfect, really.

And Reigen had published it as his own.

It wasn’t like Mob didn’t know, however. The kid knew, but Reigen had made careful work to ensure that of course he’d credit him, but this was something he could only publish if he had an adult and! Wow! He has one right here!

Truth is, Mob more than likely could’ve had it paneled on his own, judged, peer-reviewed. But Reigen needed people to know that not only was he smart, but his student, was, too, of course. So, with Mob partially on board, based solely on the fact he didn’t know what was even out there, and he didn’t know he didn’t need Reigen, Reigen had published the paper with himself as the sole author, and Mob’s name in small letters. 

It had been an absolute hit.

Mob was talented, there was no doubt about it.

It became a trend, though. Mob would work on projects over breaks, and ask Reigen if he could send them to be peer-reviewed, stars in his eyes, excitement brimming in his own uniquely-Mob way. Reigen would do it, because it got him his own shiny gold star in the world of academia, and he had a growing catalogue of citeable material.

“You know he’s publishing your work under his name, right?” Ritsu asks him, one day, while they’re in a convenience store. He picks up a pack of chips he knows his brother likes and tucks them into the basket.

“I know. He has to or else they can’t be published. He’s still crediting me.” Mob takes a bar of chocolate and puts it into the basket, moving down the aisle with him.

Ritsu grumbles something, but lets it go, because there is only so much he can do to sway his brother’s mind. Mob had, undeniably, become a lot better at sticking up for himself and at speaking his thoughts, and though Ritsu hated Reigen’s guts, hated him for all that he had, he loved his brother more than he hated his teacher.

“As long as you know,” Ritsu says, and brings their stuff to the counter.

❧

Opening up to Katsuya came easily, Reigen finds. He spent his early adulthood bouncing from therapist to therapist, attempting to find one that could poke and prod him enough to get him to spill his issues, but Katsuya crossed his walls in only a few attempts. Where Katsuya opened up to him about the isolation he caused for his family, how their community practically excommunicated them, Reigen opened up about his blatant theft of Mob’s work. He opened up about his personal pressure, the pedestal he puts himself on. He tells Katsuya it all, and he really doesn’t know why; what was it that was so compelling?

Maybe he isn’t a merman at all, Reigen thinks as he sits atop his rock, staring down at the male. Maybe he’s a siren or something.

“You’re staring,” Katsuya says, but he says it so gently it sounds anything but rude, and Reigen swoons. He completely and utterly swoons because Katsuya is so damn pretty, he listens so well, and best of all, he’s different. He doesn’t understand human life, or human activities. He doesn’t know about human problems or issues. He’s so detached from it all and that’s new and fresh and Reigen’s obsessed. He’s obsessed with it all; with their interactions, with their differences, with Katsuya and his damn iridescent scales.

“Not at all,” Reigen retorts, and clears his throat. He closes his notebook, which he has opened to same page for the last three meets and added nothing to, and tucks his pen into the slot on the spine.

“Are you going?”

“We’ll meet at our regular time, don’t worry,” Reigen says with a coolness he knows is fabricated. He scoots off the rock and hikes up his pants, ready to traverse the shallow water back around the rock.

Reigen doesn’t realize he likes Katsuya then, though, no. He watches the body swim away, scales shining, reflecting all sorts of colour from the sun and the waters surface. He doesn’t realize it then because he’s too busy navigating his way back to the beach. The thought slips him; so conveniently, just as it had every time it bubbled to the surface, threatened to burst.

In truth, it takes three weeks into what was meant to be a two week process for Reigen to realize he likes Katsuya.

Extensions are a normal apart of work, a normal aspect of academia, a common and regular thing, Reigen tells himself, as he sits at his office desk and stares at his calendar on the wall, wishing it was three days ahead, wishing it was closer to the circled MEET date. He’s sitting, tapping his fingers against the desk, no attempt having even been made to pretend like he was doing anything important, when it hits him like a freight train.

He likes Katsuya.

Of course, he thinks, because of course he likes the first person he becomes close to that’s remotely his age. Of course this is how it’s going to be because he can’t just be normal. Reigen groans and reaches into his pocket, pulling out his carton of cigarettes and propping open the window of the office, striking a match and taking a long drag.

The deadline is pushing and he’s following Katsuya around like a lost dog looking to lap up crumbs. It’s all too obvious, he realizes, now, as he reaches for his notebook with his freehand and sees he hasn’t written anything new in a week. He had reached his peak, he had nothing new and exciting to ask Katsuya, and his paper was more than ready to be written, yet, here he sat, counting down hours until their next bullshit interact.

Reigen turns to face his computer, tabs open an email, and double, triple checks his deadline. He had to cut himself off, he knew that, but damn, it was easier said than done.

He sighs and buries his head in his arms, lazily holding his cigarette up.

❧

Reigen hesitates to bring it up to Katsuya. He doesn’t quite know why— Katsuya would take it well, wouldn’t he? It was Reigen that was the issue, not him, and surely it would be easier to see Katsuya not care, right? It would make him not care. 

His walk around to the cove is slower than usual, and he arrives with no notebook, no pen. Hands in his pockets, he approaches his dried rock, throat feeling awfully dry for a change.

“Ah, did you lose your notes?” Katsuya asks, and he’s so concerned Reigen could melt. He could melt right into the ocean right there because he’s so sure nobody has ever looked at him with such worry or such care like Katsuya is doing right then. His heart cinches, squeezes in his chest, and he clears his throat like it’ll help the feeling.

“I’ve got all I need for my paper, now.” Reigen doesn’t look up from his shoes. He’s a coward, and he knows it.

“Oh.” Oh. It repeats in Reigen's mind, over and over, like it's stuck on loop. Oh. Katsuya sounds as destroyed as Reigen feels, and it makes his chest hurt even more. If that had only been an ache before, this felt damn-near like a stab. He feels it twist in him as Katsuya looks at him, brows furrowed, a series of emotions running over him. A goddamn fish has more emotional maturity than me.

“Sorry,” Reigen says, because it’s the best he has to offer, and turns to leave.

“We can still visit, though, right?” Katsuya sounds hopeful, and that alone kills Reigen.

It kills Reigen because he knows this is unrealistic, and he’s an idiot for getting involved. It kills Reigen because he knows he should have cut this off when he had the chance, when he really finished his work, because now it was too late. Now there's feelings involved, shits messy, and he has obligations to fulfill, morals that he’s crushing.

So, he says it. He tells Katsuya, “Of course we will,” and he smiles with a confidence he knows is fake, because dammit, he refuses to look Katsuya in the eye and see him looking back distraught, or destroyed.

Katsuya just about beams and Reigen makes to leave, trying to get out before the guilt in his chest overtakes him. Before it swallows him whole.

Leaving the cove doesn’t calm the guilt though. It doesn’t quench the fire in him, it doesn’t stomp out the ashes of his regret, the suffocation as it crawls up his trachea. He knew he had been lying when he said it, knew he meant none of it, knew he had no intentions of coming back to this cove, yet he said it regardless. Said it because he let this go too far, and now he had someone waiting on him, and that thought could keep Reigen awake for nights on end.

Throwing himself back into his work is easy enough. He has what he needs, he has pages upon pages of conversations, notes, interactions. He writes until he isn’t quite sure what he’s writing anymore, and then he lets Mob look over it, then writes more. He corrects what he’s written, redoes a section or two, then writes even more, enough to keep his name in the academic conversation for a little while longer.

The guilt sets in, settles inside of him and makes a home next to everything else he feels shitty for. It’s another normal, really, in the life of Reigen— another thing to add to his collection of awful acts. Their meeting day comes and goes, and Reigen stays in his office, Mob, legs crossed as he works on his summer project, and Reigen, ironing out the details.

He has peer-reviews lined up, and is assembling his near-final copy to send off to them and receive edits for. He attaches some photocopies of his notes, trying to garner opinions on what he should include instead, or opt to leave out in lieu of something else. 

Mob’s input is valued, and it helps silence the anger he feels for himself when their second what-would-be-a-meeting-date comes around. He briefly imagines Katsuya, waiting at the rocks, thinking maybe something had come up last time but Reigen would definitely be there this time, and shoves it back down. 

“I sent off a copy this morning,” Reigen says, as Mob looks over what appears to be the fully-complete, pending-peer-review version of Reigen’s analysis on merpeople and their connections with humans. “I think it’s pretty damn good, kiddo.”

Reigen doesn’t smoke when Mob’s around, but damn, he was nothing if not craving a cigarette. He reaches for one of the toothpicks he keeps as his desk and chews on the tip instead, leaning back against the table.

“It’s good… I really like it. How come you didn’t use any of my ideas?” Mob looks up at him, and Reigen practically chokes.

He hadn’t, hey? The paper was entirely his own.

Damn, I’m getting pretty good.

“Gotta leave room for a sequel, Mob! If I publish everything revolutionary at once, there’ll be nothing left to add!” Reigen swipes the manuscript back and tucks it into his desk, deep into a folder with all the memories of those three weeks. He closed it, let them sit in the dark for long enough, maybe he’d forget. Maybe he’d stop feeling so inconceivably bad. So terrible.

“Oh. I guess that’s right.” Mob hums and looks back down at the project he had been working on before Reigen tossed him his paper.

❧

The reception of the paper is a lot better than Reigen anticipates. The Blue Frontiers editors eat it up. They can’t wait to publish it regardless of the fact it takes up the bulk of the volume. A couple local papers write columns on it. Reigen picks one up on his way to the office one morning, reading what they wrote about him and his most recent and impressive work.

He’s making a change and he feels it. He knows it inside of him. He’d shifted the aquatic world as humans knew it, even if just slightly, and he was happy enough that if he’d die right then, he wouldn’t be mad.

But his memory rears its ugly head, and he remembers Katsuya, and he rolls up the paper and shoves it into the nearest trashcan. Why did using Katsuya invoke such a different emotion in him? Why could he make excuses for Mob, but not for him?

He hangs his coat on the hook near the door and drops into his chair, immediately propping open the window and lighting a cigarette. Turning on his laptop brings up a new email, one of many, with a request to interview him. He flicks through a couple others, tries to draft a response in his head as he reads the praise.

Is elevation based on the use of others really that bad? 

He’s putting their ideas in the world, he reasons. That can’t possibly be a bad thing. It’s for the betterment of science, of knowledge, of academia. Reigen’s doing everyone a favour, so god forbid if a few people get hurt here and there.

He agrees to the interview and leans against his window, blowing smoke out into the city. Work over friendship, right? Priorities, he tells himself. Priorities. Priorities. Priorities.

Reigen takees the interview the following week. It’s at a conference hall close to the beach, and that does wonders for his work in shoving Katsuya into the back of his mind. He sits at a show-offy desk with a show-offy host who really knows nothing about the world of academia, much less aquatics, Reigen realizes, but goes through with it anyway. He takes the questions like a champ, shares sections he chose to edit out, and when all is said and done, despite the angry winds he stops outside for a cigarette, his third that day.

It’s just a coincidence, he thinks. I’m not stressed. How could he be stressed when this is the height of his career? The most important he’s ever been? He just gave a goddamn interview and he fucking killed it so how could he be stressed?

It’s all bullshit. He stomps out the end and goes for a walk down to the sand, hair awry from the aggressive blowing, hands dug deep into his pockets. The lights from the conference building are bright, but the further Reigen gets, the more removed from it he feels.

He made a damn good paper, all of his own ideas, and people fucking love it. So why does he feel like this? Why does he feel the unshakable, ugly, guilt-ridden lump in his throat so clearly? Had he taken on too much? Was perpetually feeling shitty for using Mob not enough, he needed to double the load? Triple it?

He finds himself back at the cove. He doesn’t realize it at first. Not really. He’s just walking, thinking, brows furrowed, mind a million miles an hour as he tries to make sense of his fucked up turmoil of emotions. He only realizes when he notices his pants are soaked up to his knees and he feels his socks squish with water. He’s at the rock he’d hoisted himself up on so many times before. Where he had stared down at Katsuya during that three week period and stared. Stared because he was probably the most gorgeous thing he had ever seen, and he was robbing him blind.

The wind whips him hard and leaves him feeling cold. His socks are wet, his shoes are filled, and his pants are dark where the water had gone up. He digs his feet into the rocks, anyway, and pushes himself up onto the tallest outcropping, out towards the deeper end of the cove. It’s where the water really meets the sea, and the wind is whipping the hardest, and Reigen takes an inhale long enough to supply him with enough air until he dies.

He decides to push his luck— sitting isn’t enough for him, apparently— so he presses himself upward even more, pulling his water-logged shoes onto the slick of the stone, standing up and letting the wind rip against him. It’s harsh and it hurts, he thinks, as the cold fabric stings his skin. But it feels real, he feels alive, and… Wet? He feels completely and utterly drenched?

It takes him an extra second to realize he’s gone under. He hadn’t even realized he'd fallen. His eyes open, but between the night and the water being far from clear, it does nothing but make him panic more. He takes in some water in the inhale and it burns, burns like nothing he’s ever felt before, and the panic sends him thrashing his arms.

He’s beating against the surface, legs kicking underwater, lungs burning and god I’m gonna die here, he thinks, in that moment. He can’t keep his head above water, he can’t catch a breath, and he’s gonna die.

Reigen thinks of the office. He thinks of Mob, of their papers, of his own papers, of Blue Frontiers. He thinks of the interview, the newspaper column, of the drawer he desperately wanted to keep closed because front and center in his notebook was a polaroid of Katsuya. He thinks of how suffocated he feels, how heavy his chest is, how he thought he could see the surface for a second, but since he stopped thrashing, he hasn’t been able to.

It’s stupid, he knows that. He isn’t suicidal, hasn’t been in a long time, and definitely not tonight. He hadn’t met to fall— hell, he hadn’t even noticed that he did, not until he was under, not until he tried to inhale and got nothing but salty, cold water.

Something happens in the in-between. Reigen had been in the water, he couldn’t see much, he couldn’t get his arms to thrash anymore, and he could barely hear with all the water in his ears. But something happens between that and now, as he hacks up a lung on the rocky, shallow land of the cove, and pounds his chest with a weak fist, spewing water like its vomit.

He’s hunched over, lying on his side and holding himself up with one arm while he leans forward and cough up salty water, feels the burn in him, feels how wet his throat feels still with each shaky inhale. Each intake of air causes more coughing.

But how? How am I not dead?

It wasn’t like he wanted to be dead. But god, how the fuck was he alive? How had his stupidity cashed out into luck? How many gods did he please when he did that interview? How many lifelines did he craft himself?

He pushes himself away from the ground and he’s there. He’s there. He’s standing— wait, he’s standing?— and staring down at Reigen, brows furrowed, expression just as angry as it concerned. Reigen stares, chest burning, absolutely and completely thoroughly sure he’s dreaming. 

He must be, he reasons, because Katsuya has legs right now, and that is very much not the Katsuya he knows. He’s dreaming, he knows that, he feels it in him. Surely, this is the type of shit that happens before you die. When you’re drowning and you enter the Unknown, the life in-between, and your brain makes up shit to drift you off easier.

“I-“ Speaking just ends in coughing, and Reigen spits into the shallow water, coughing twice as much.

Katsuya crouches, though does it with hesitation and uncertainty, and places a hand to Reigen’s side. If Reigen wasn’t so sure he was still dying, he might’ve pushed him off, shoved him away, insisted of coughing up the water alone. But he’s dying, he reasons, so right now he’ll indulge his brain. He’ll let this made-up Katsuya touch his side, stare down at him in concern, unsureness, doing nothing and everything at the same time.

When Reigen has coughed a sufficient amount, he sits up against some stone of the cove, and lets himself breathe heavily, deeply, and take in as much air as he can. Dream Katsuya still hasn’t left, and it’s starting to dawn on him that maybe he’s not dreaming at all. Maybe he’s just as alive as he is awake right now, and he has a whole new set of issues to deal with.

“Are you okay?” Katsuya asks him, crouching next to him, and it sounds just like him, but he has legs so surely Reigen is not awake, right? He must be asleep, or even dead, fabricating a scenario where he miraculously survives.

“I- How- You have legs,” Why Reigen settles on that, he doesn’t know. Maybe hypothermia is setting in and he’s losing his mind. His clothes are dead cold and sticking to his body, and he’s still sitting in shallow water. It would only make sense that he’s going mental, right? Full-body frostbite or something.

“I- I know, they’re new,” Katsuya says, and it sounds so ridiculous and Reigen is so delirious that he laughs. He cackles, really, doubles over, even, despite the pain in his chest. They’re new. He sounds like a murderer.

“How?”

“Have you ever read those fairytales about the princess kissing the frog?” Katsuya says, and smiles. Smiles despite the situation, despite the realization that strikes Reigen, that at some point in the in-between, Katsuya gave up his identity for human legs to save Reigen. 

He feels ill.

“Fuck.” Fuck, Reigen settles with, because fuck. Because he lied to Katsuya, betrayed him, and here he was, saving him, becoming human for him. Throwing away his own life to save his.

“It’s okay,” Katsuya says, like he can tell what Reigen is thinking. He sits down in the cold, shallow water, and gently pats Reigen’s knee.

“Why?” Reigen musters.

“Watch you die or become human. The choice is pretty easy.”

“But why? I lied to you, Katsuya. I abandoned you.” Reigen presses again, and god, his eyelids feel heavy.

Katsuya stays quiet, then, looks back out towards the open end of the cove and the water ahead. 

“You were also my first real friend,” Katsuya says, and it’s so quiet, Reigen could almost convince himself that maybe he’s just not use to human speech, human lungs, human thought processes.

“I ditched you. I lied to you, I told you I’d come back and I had no intentions on doing that. I lied to you like I’ve lied to Mob. Like I’ve lied to everybody.” It hurt so bad to talk, but Reigen did it regardless. He pushed, despite his chest hurting, despite his lungs burning, despite how he was so cold that it felt like he was on fire. “And now you’re a human. And that's my fault, Katsuya. I don’t know how to say I’m sorry.”

It was the most genuine Reigen had ever felt. Maybe it was the cold, maybe it was the circumstances, the fiery swell of hurt in him— who the fuck knows. But he was being honest, embarrassingly so, and laying all of his cards out on the table.

Katsuya doesn’t say anything. He just squeezes Reigen’s knee and sits in silence for a little bit.

“It’s not all your fault. The mouth-to-mouth was probably unnecessary. I just panicked. I see the helpers do it on the beach sometimes. Thought that’s what I was supposed to do.” Katsuya sounds so honest and genuine that it makes Reigen laugh. It’s shocking, really, how much he was laughing despite the situation.

“Lifeguards,” Reigen corrects, and it hits him all at once he’s going to be doing a lot more correcting from now on. 

❧

They walk to the hospital before it gets too bad. Though it hurts to breathe too heavy, and his clothes are so wet he’s sure his dress-shirt is just about see-through, they trudge to the nearest place and Reigen checks himself in. When he gets there, he’s rushed to get changed, get warm— understandably so, considering he shows up drenched after walking with wind whipping him like a freight train.

They deal with what’s next on Monday. 

It feels only right to set Katsuya up with something, considering Reigen has permanently indebted him to human life. He gives him at job at Sealife and Such, lets him have the futon in his cramped apartment, and helps him start to fill out the paperwork he needs.

It’s a Friday evening, a month later, when Reigen is locking up the office that they finally, really address it.

“Do you regret it?” Reigen says, after a particularly busy day. Mob had dragged them around to help with the final pieces of his summer project. Mob had been taking well to Katsuya, and it made Reigen’s chest bloom with warmth. Every time Mob showed him popular movies, or manga. When they went out to eat and Mob asked Katsuya if he had tried this or that, and Katsuya always said no. Two aspects of his life were becoming soldered together so easily, and Reigen… Reigen was left speechless all the time because of it.

“Regret what?” Katsuya asks, hiking his shoulder bag up. He was still getting used to the small parts of human-ness, like totes and messenger bags. He had a habit of leaning to the side, and off would come the bag strap.

“Pulling me out of the water. Being a human isn’t all too exciting.” Reigen says it like its a joke, but theres a hint of seriousness beneath the surface. He knows it all too well. He turns the key in the lock and heads down the stairs, taking his time as Katsuya trails behind, still getting used to stairs.

“Of course I don’t regret it. Reigen-“ Katsuya reaches for Reigen’s arm, stopping him, and there they stood, on the stairs, Katsuya a few steps behind, holding Reigen’s wrist, and Reigen, turned, looking back at him.

“My family will be better off without me there to spoil our name. Without me, they can get a fresh start. That’s all I can ask for.” Katsuya joins him on the stair he’s on, looks down at him, and smiles something soft. Reigen feels it again, in his stomach— the same feeling that caused this all, that made him run.

But he doesn’t run this time. He looks up at Katsuya, examines him in the shitty light of the office stairwell, and drowns in the fact that this was all real. This had been real from the start, and the world works in mysterious ways. 

So, Reigen does what he does best. He acts without thinking. He moves his hand up, cups the side of Katsuya’s face, and kisses his cheek. It makes his own face red, and he feels Katsuya’s heat up, as well, but speaks before he can get too caught up in it.

“Thank you. Seriously, Katsuya. I don’t know how to thank you enough.”

Katsuya hums something, maybe a chuckle, Reigen’s not sure.

“Well, you can start by doing that more often.” 

You little shit, Reigen thinks, all smiles, and stands on his tippy-toes to kiss him.