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“Shachi?” Bepo’s voice says, his familiar-growing hesitant growl cutting through the dead night’s quiet, and Shachi nearly falls off the roof from the suddenness. He doesn’t, barely, a pitiful relief—he’s nearly fifteen, he shouldn’t be almost falling off roofs. “What are you doing out here?”
Careful, Shachi sits himself upright to turn towards Bepo. The polar bear—Mink, Shachi reminds himself, Mink—is hanging half out the window leading back into their attic bedroom, his fur gleaming white against the darkness. His eyes are wide and worried, about Shachi of all people, and that’s another stab of past guilt. Shachi swallows it, smiles at Bepo, teeth hidden behind his lips.
“Bepo? Shouldn’t you be in bed?”
“Shouldn’t you?” Bepo counters, and then winces, a whole body flinch and squeak. “Sorry!”
“Don’t apologize!” Shachi says, and Bepo opens his mouth again— “Don’t! You’re right. I should be asleep—but, you know, I couldn’t. So I’m stargazing.”
“Stargazing?”
“Do you want to join?” Shachi asks, and Bepo lights up, practically throwing himself the rest of way out the window and onto the roof. He scurries over the tile, a giddy bounce in every step, to sit next to Shachi, presence warming against the night chill. Shachi fights the urge to lean into his fur, instead lies himself back on the roof. Bepo follows suit.
“Oh!” Bepo says, a gasp. “The stars are different!”
“Than on Zou?” Shachi says. “I guess that makes sense—my mom once told me that different seas have different views of the night sky.”
“Huh,” Bepo says, and then his voice goes small. Tiny, even. Miserable. “Of course I got lost. How am I going to find my way home?”
In all honesty, Shachi doesn’t know. But he looks over, at Bepo’s earnest, open face, and offers to teach him about the stars of the North Blue, what little Shachi knows. And it’s nothing, really—they beat Bepo up!—but Bepo beams at him, all brilliant sharp teeth. On him, they don’t look monstrous, and Shachi finds himself grinning back, a mirror image. Brighter than any star, and in this moment, more meaningful than any constellation.
And so Shachi huddles in for warmth, Bepo immediately wrapping an arm around him in a hug, and starts to point out the strs and their constellations. All of them—the Star of the North, the Night Sun, Taurus, the Narwhal, the Spear of Destiny, the School, Big Whale and Small Whale, the Swallow—the stars of his mother’s stories and long nights spent on the hill behind his house. And after Bepo asks, he tells Bepo the stories too, the Swallow island legends, and after too long a hesitation, the fishman ones too. Bepo doesn’t question those—just soaks up each star and story with ease, a whiz at spotting them and a natural at reading the sky—but Shachi swallows down the fear and tells him anyways.
He knows the fishman names for stars because he’s a quarter fishman, on his mother’s side. And Shachi hasn’t seen his relatives in months, and he’s an outcast of Pleasure Town anyways, and this is Bepo, and Bepo’s both a Mink and too nice for his own good, but he still half-expects Bepo to flinch away in fear. Is half-surprised when he doesn’t. Is more surprised when Bepo says that Shachi is so cool, and means it, the gesture a dagger straight to the gut. The roles reversed, and Shachi had attacked him!
Maybe Shachi should have fallen off the roof—he’s earned the bruises. But instead, he looks back up at the night sky, the Spear of Destiny pointing towards true North, and swears on it, an old ritual promise his mother had told him about. He can be better. For Bepo, he will be.