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“Look, we just need to pretend to be in love for a few hours, right?” Iori said. “That would hardly be difficult at all, Nanase. I’m sure the Sea Witch sees thousands of couples a day. We’ll be in and out in a few hours, you’ll have the option of having legs, I’ll have an option of having gills, and during the operation, we may be able to gain some information on your brother’s fate. Nothing can go wrong with this at all.”
Riku did not look convinced.
“Or what, did you have another problem with my plan?”
“Yes,” said the mermaid. “I don’t want to pretend to be in love with you.”
The fisherman rolled his eyes. “Then good luck ever finding where the Sea Witch dumped your brother’s corpse!”
This, like most of Izumi Iori’s arguments, was convincing. Riku capitulated and they made arrangements to visit the Sea Witch at dawn the next morning, fully convinced that they would make a perfect impression of the perfect couple. After all, Iori’s brother already swore up and down that they were perfect for each other, and Riku’s friends in the sea were convinced they were secretly dating already, despite all of their protestations to the contrary. There was no way that the Sea Witch would see through what even their friends could not, especially when they started actually pretending to be in love.
According to Riku, the Sea Witch lived in a cave near the beach, for ease of access to customers. Iori had heard different—that the Sea Witch kept a house in the city, and if you asked around discreetly enough, you would be brought there—but the cave was quite frankly far preferable in his eyes. For one, it was accessible by both land and sea; for two, rumor had it that the guide to the Sea Witch’s townhouse was Iori’s nemesis, the young nobleman Kujo Tenn. It was bad enough to have to deal with Tenn about town; if he caught wind of any of this farce, Iori would never live it down, not ever.
Kujo Tenn was a real stick in the mud with an equally-sized stick right up his derriere; he and Iori had been rivals in everything since Tenn had moved into town when they were young teens (even if Tenn had yet to consistently remember Iori’s name), and he would never understand the appeal of scamming and robbing the Sea Witch. Iori wouldn’t have understood the appeal, if he hadn’t first met the energetic young mermaid Nanase Riku, whose smile was like the sun, whose laugh was electricity, whose voice alone was enough to convince anyone that old sailors’ tales of sirens and their enchanting voices were empirical fact. Riku’s twin brother had been stolen away by the Sea Witch some five years ago, and Riku had made getting his brother back his mission in life ever since. As far as Riku was concerned, this little escapade would end quite happily in a fraternal reunion (hopefully with a side of legs for Riku and gills for Iori!) and then on to introducing said brother to all of their friends—both mer (Nanase Riku, Osaka Sougo, Yotsuba Tamaki) and human (Izumi Iori, Izumi Mitsuki, Nikaido Yamato, Rokuya Nagi).
Iori was somewhat less optimistic—he was fairly certain that, were he in Riku’s shoes here, and tried this reckless and ill-thought-out plan, upon learning his actions Mitsuki would fillet him alive—but when it was someone else’s brother at stake Iori minded far less. He did not know Riku’s older brother from Adam—all he knew were the scars his absence had left on Riku, and that like as not the boy had left willingly. After all, the Sea Witch had a certain reputation, earned entirely honestly: you came to him, and, whatever Mephistophelian bargain he offered, you chose whether or not to accept or to reject it. There were no consequences for walking away. Whatever had happened to Nanase Tenn to cause his disappearance had been his own choice, on some level. He had gotten something he wanted out of the bargain, though what it was Iori didn’t know. Riku suspected something, but he was tight-lipped as to what that suspicion actually was, and so Iori had no way to know whether or not the suspicion was realistic, or to make any form of guess as to what Riku’s brother’s deal had been—in all senses of the term.
None of this, however, seemed to be of a concern to literally anyone else. When Iori informed Mitsuki of their plan, Mitsuki had laughed and suggested that actually confessing his feelings to Riku would be a better use of their time. Iori had flushed, scowled, muttered that the only feelings he harbored towards Nanase Riku were those of schadenfreude, and had darted down to their meeting spot at the beach a solid hour before sunrise. Here, he paced, feeling the cold sand between his toes, and muttered to himself about misconceptions about cute and stupid boys until he collided with a boy who was neither cute nor stupid—Iori’s nemesis, Kujo Tenn himself.
“What are you doing here, Kujo?” Iori blurted before he could stop himself.
Tenn fixed him with a withering glance. “Walking,” he said. “For my health. What about you? I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you around here at this hour before.”
Iori smirked. “Romantic rendezvous,” he said, which was not remotely true, but it was the lie they were putting out, and they were here on the beach directly above the Sea Witch’s cave, so there was no harm in lying to him about this.
Unfortunately, Kujo Tenn held no interest in romance and was not impressed by this. “Are you,” he said, looking at Iori like he was the sand under their feet. “When is that supposed to occur?”
“How is that any of your business?” Iori shot back.
“…I just don’t want to have to deal with my father seeing you, that’s all.”
“Why?” said Iori. “Is he as insufferable as you are?”
“Worse.”
Iori rolled his eyes. “Well, we’ll try to stay out of his way,” he said.
“Do better than that. I have enough on my plate already without having to deal with you and whoever your little paramour is. Actually stay out of his way, and off of his radar, and as far away from my family as you can physically get.”
“Big words from the Fonte Chocolat regular,” said Iori.
Tenn flushed. “It’s fine if it’s for work reasons,” he snapped. “Just keep your—romance away from us. I have enough trouble already with that girl and her stupid voice…”
“Huh?” said Iori.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Tenn, and he turned on his heel and rushed back up the beach, cutting through the dunes to return to his father’s manor. Iori had never before realized just how close the Kujo manor was to the Sea Witch’s cave; he wondered why as he waited for the sunrise, and then decided that assholes attract assholes and of course if anyone were to be neighbors with the guy who spirited away a child mermaid and then like as not killed him and framed his bones on the wall it would be Kujo Tenn.
As the sky began to stain with the pre-sunrise, Iori rolled up his pants and waded out into the water, deep enough that Riku wouldn’t accidentally beach himself again, but shallow enough that he wouldn’t be swept out to sea and drown, and there he waited for the mermaid to arrive. It was a good thing that Kujo Tenn had left, and a good thing too that he’d showed up when he had. Iori hadn’t expected their meeting-place to be so close to his rival’s house. Now he knew it was, knew enough to leave the Sea Witch’s cave by a different way so that the bastard wouldn’t catch wind of their scheme.
—Though, granted, if Kujo Tenn were stupid enough to make a deal with the Sea Witch Iori would love to see it, would love to see its aftermath. After all, Tenn was nobility, was close friends with the Crown Prince, was widely regarded as one of the pillars of the nation. The fallout from any deal he made with the Sea Witch was guaranteed to be wide-reaching, and wildly entertaining, and like as not present Iori with a great foothold into politics.
He was pulled from these musings, however, by a series of ripples nearing him in the water, by a flash of sunset-orange scales, and then finally by a tackle-hug from an overenthusiastic and soggy mermaid.
“Iori!” Riku cheered. “You actually came! I’m so glad!”
Iori glugged, air bubbles escaping from his mouth; he pushed himself from the seafloor and stood, coughing and spitting out saltwater and wiping his stinging eyes.
“Obviously I came, this was my idea,” said Iori, once he’d cleared his airways once more. “And Nanase, I’ve told you a hundred times not to greet me like that. I’ll drown one of these days.”
“No you won’t, I know how to resuscitate humans,” said Riku. “And anyway soon you’ll be able to breathe water too!”
“Temporarily.”
“Deals with the Sea Witch are permanent and irreversible, it’s like on the first page of all those warnings compiled about him,” Riku informed Iori. “It’ll be permanent for both of us.”
“Well, la dee da,” Iori muttered. “—It had better not make me as coldblooded as you are, Nanase. I need to be actually able to function in the winter.”
“Well, I don’t see why you wouldn’t be able to,” said Riku, pouting. “I’m able to function in the winter just fine!”
“Only when you’re near a thermal vent!” said Iori. “Or you swim up here and harass me about it.”
“I do not harass you!”
“You do so, you stalk my boat until I let you on it and then you make me cuddle you all day for warmth.”
“I pay you in fish!”
“More fish than my family could ever need!”
“Isn’t selling fish to other humans your job ?”
“Yes,” Iori lied, because he had dug himself into a hole years ago with that one and absolutely nobody had offered him any help in digging himself out. It had of course provided an excellent excuse for seeing Riku every day, but honestly, he didn’t even need that. Riku did not have even an ounce of critical thought in his entire body. He would never have even wondered what Iori did with his life if Iori hadn’t given him the stupid fisherman lie. And he really had dug himself deep with it too—he had even bought a boat off the late Mr. Tsunashi and then taken to selling the catch Riku brought him in the marketplace.
“Then I don’t see what you’re so upset about,” Riku huffed, turning away. “They’re nice fish, tasty and good to eat, and you ought to be grateful for them.”
“You’re a nice fish who’s tasty and good to eat,” Iori muttered, and then his brain caught up with his mouth and his face heated up and he cleared his throat and tried to stuff the weird feelings swirling in him away. “Anyway! We should go see the Sea Witch now. We don’t want to get stuck in a line, or anything.”
“Do you really think there’ll be a line?” said Riku. “It’s illegal to make deals with the Sea Witch, you know.”
“When has something being illegal ever stopped anybody?” said Iori. “There might be a line. We have no way of knowing. Besides, we’re a little too close to civilization for my comfort. I would really rather not have to deal with anyone seeing us here.”
“Would anyone?” said Riku.
“Unfortunately, yes. There are some extremely annoying people around the area.”
“Oh, like the Sea Witch!”
Iori thought of Kujo Tenn’s cold eyes. “Worse,” he said.
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Okay, we really should go, then,” Riku said, casting a worried glance around them. “You know where the cave is, right?”
“Why would I?” Iori said. “It’s a completely different process for humans to find the Sea Witch. I would rather not use it.”
Not least because it seemed to involve asking Kujo Tenn for help.
“Oh,” said Riku. “I guess you’ll just have to follow me, then. How long can you hold your breath?”
“Long enough,” said Iori. “Do you have any way for humans to breathe underwater, though? Just in case.”
“Oh! Yes, I do!” Riku beamed at him, earlier annoyance entirely forgotten. “Okay, open your mouth.”
Iori did so, wondering about the flavor of whatever potion or strange food Riku was about to make him eat or drink. He expected something briny, cold and squishy, like fresh, raw fish; in a sense, this was what he got, too. Riku splashed upwards, grabbed the collar of Iori’s shirt, and pressed his open mouth to Iori’s mouth; as Iori suddenly froze, heat rushing to every corner of his body, Riku yanked him underwater, lips making a seal over Iori’s mouth, cold and wet and tasting of seawater, and Iori forgot how to breathe for an entirely different reason. Riku’s lips were warming against his, now, and as the mermaid tugged Iori out towards open ocean, Iori decided, Fuck it, if this is what Nanase wants to do with his morning, I might as well indulge him, and began kissing him back. —Not because he wanted to, of course! He would never want to kiss Nanase Riku, not ever, not in a million years. For one, Iori didn’t have a crush on him. For two, Iori would never dare have his first kiss before Mitsuki did. For three, Izumi Iori did not have a crush on Nanase Riku! He was doing this for Riku’s sake and Riku’s sake alone, that was all.
—Still, maybe it wasn’t entirely terrible—not that Iori would ever admit that to anybody in a million years, he wasn’t that foolish. He would never live it down, if he admitted to actually enjoying a kiss with Nanase Riku. Everyone would be even more convinced than they already were that Iori had feelings for him, which he didn’t, and then people might try to set them up, and then he would have to hear Riku say that he didn’t actually like Iori back, and—
Well, Iori didn’t have a crush on Riku, so there!
They burst through the surface of the water inside an underwater cave system. Iori pulled his head away from Riku’s and gasped and coughed; Riku dove back underneath the water and swam a circle around the perimeter until Iori caught his breath. Once this was done, he swam up to Iori, a mischievous little grin on his face.
“So,” he said, “what was that thing you were doing with your tongue earlier? You know, when I was making sure you’d be able to keep breathing underwater and swimming us over here.”
Iori’s face went hot, and he took Riku by the shoulders and dunked him violently, which would have been far more effective had Riku not been capable of breathing water. Riku came up laughing, and Iori dunked him again.
“Did you like the way I tasted?” Riku said when he came up this time, and Iori thought that the heat from his face alone probably could have warmed the entire ocean if he went underwater again.
“It was interesting and unique, and I was curious,” he said with as much dignity as he could muster. “But—that was just so I could breathe underwater? You didn’t have any other reason at all for, uh. For the mouth-to-mouth?”
“No?” said Riku, a perfect picture of confusion. “What other reason would I have for it, Iori?”
—A perfect picture of confusion, yes, other than that broad, shit-eating grin leaking onto his face. Iori blushed harder, scowled at him, and finally decided that this was an argument safest left unpursued.
“…Let’s just go see the Sea Witch,” he said, and Riku’s laugh echoed all around the cave like starlight.
It was not fun, swimming through a cold, dark underwater cave system, but it was infinitely preferable to kissing Riku again for air. Besides, the sunk-cost fallacy was real and Iori’s closest companion; he had come this far, he couldn’t turn back now. They were going to pull one over on the Sea Witch and find and steal the corpse of Riku’s older brother, and live happily ever after to boot.
And if Iori was really lucky, none of this would ever get back to Mitsuki specifically, and to the rest of their friends generally, and to Kujo Tenn besides, who had no skin in this particular game but who was guaranteed to be completely insufferable about it regardless.
It didn’t take long for them to reach the main section of the Sea Witch’s cave. It had been an annoying swim, but not an impossible one; odds were, Iori figured, that the Sea Witch didn’t want to chase customers away, no matter how they came to him, human or mermaid, from land or from sea. And Iori wasn’t going to be thinking of any of the real difficulties in getting here, thank you very much, because that had been embarrassing as all get out and Iori had no intentions of reliving it, not now and not when he and Riku left with their prizes.
Riku was already searching for one of these prizes, diving deep to examine the floor of the cave and any treasures or bones that might litter it. For his part, Iori swam to a ledge jutting out of the wall and pulled himself up on it to lay flat on the damp rock, exhausted, chest heaving as he sucked the oxygen into his lungs. Swimming was exhausting, and pretending that he hadn’t kissed Riku was even more so. He would sleep well tonight, that was for sure.
Footsteps echoed across the stone; Iori shot upwards into a sitting position and turned to see—what the hell— Kujo Tenn’s father clicked across the stone floor, the bottom half of his body somehow transformed into something like a giant crab.
I guess they were living too close to the Sea Witch after all, Iori thought half-hysterically; then he watched, shocked, as the waters churned and Riku was brought squirming up from the bottom of the cave. He squirmed at first, like any fish caught in a net, and then his eyes locked on the crab-shaped Lord Kujo and darkened with a hatred Iori never would have thought possible from the sweet mermaid.
“Sea Witch!” he gasped out, fury bleeding into his every syllable, and Iori first thought, God, no wonder Kujo Tenn sucks so extremely badly, he’s a mini Sea Witch, and then he thought, Fuck, Nanase, shut up, shut up, shut up, we’re here to make a deal with him, you complete and utter idiot, shut up, shut up, shut up!
“Have we met before?” said Kujo, and Riku very nearly opened his mouth and brought suspicion down on them like rain, but Iori scrambled to his feet and cut him off.
“We’re here to make a deal!” he shouted, and then added as an afterthought, “Because we’re madly in love and want to get married.”
Riku’s eyes widened. Married? he mouthed at Iori.
We want to make this convincing, Iori mouthed back. What kind of idiot would change their species for any commitment less than an engagement?
“Yeah, we—we really want to get married,” said Riku, sounding almost convincing. Unfortunately, this reminded Iori again that they were not actually here to get married, and technically their commitment level here was somewhere between ‘an idea Iori came up yesterday to kill time today’ and ‘attempted impulse theft of the five-year-rotted corpse of Riku’s older brother’, and between the disappointment of the reminder and the jolt of adrenaline at the fact that they were here lying out of their asses to a nobleman (who also happened to be the Sea Witch, but who cared about that, really) Iori felt his hands begin to shake, and he balled them up in his sopping pant legs and clenched his jaw to stop his teeth from chattering.
“As you can obviously see,” said Iori, “our species differences present some, uh, difficulties in properly getting married, as we so long to do, so we’d like to make a deal with you in exchange for the ability for both of us to switch between mermaid and human specieses at will, so that Nanase could walk and breathe and otherwise survive on the land just as well as any human could and I could swim and breathe and otherwise survive underwater just as well as any mermaid could.”
“Greedy of you,” said the Sea Witch.
“Well, obviously we’ll want to visit the in-laws, and that would be impossible if we were stuck as any one species,” Iori shot back.
“Yeah,” said Riku. “Family ties are important, you know?”
Don’t mention your brother, don’t mention your brother, don’t mention your brother, let’s just make the deal and get married and leave.
—Get married? Why had Iori thought that they should get married, down here in this awful cold smelly salty cave with only Kujo Tenn’s father to officiate? That was ridiculous—if he were ever to marry Riku, he would do it in a much nicer venue. The only advantage this one had was that Riku couldn’t get away.
“And we’re important to each other, too,” Iori added quickly, pushing that strange thought from his head. “Which is why—”
“Which is why you refer to your fiancé by his surname only?” the Sea Witch said, just as dry as Kujo Tenn could be.
Iori’s face went hot. “Well—I—his given name is too personal!” he snapped.
“But you call everyone else by their given name, Iori,” Riku said, pouting at him.
“Not everyone else,” Iori muttered, flushing harder. “Just—you know.”
“I know what?”
“People whose names it’s not embarrassing to say!”
“How is my name embarrassing to say?!”
“You’re getting married and you haven’t discussed this once before?” said the Sea Witch, a broad grin creeping over his features. “Are you two in love at all?”
“Of course we are!” Riku and Iori snapped in unison, and Iori felt his chest warm a little bit before he remembered that they were in fact faking this and turned away, suddenly upset for reasons he could not verbalize.
The Sea Witch, looking pleased as punch with this turn of events, placed Riku down (oh no, Iori thought, now he can get away) on the ledge next to Iori and scuttled over closer to them.
“I’ll offer you two a deal,” he said. “It’s a good one—easy for you to fulfill. You won’t need to worry about anything.”
Oh no, Iori thought. We’re getting a bad deal.
Well, of course they were. The Sea Witch was Kujo Tenn’s father. Iori would have been surprised if they’d gotten a good deal, really.
“You’ll gain the ability you asked for—to switch between human and mermaid at will—so long as you fulfill one condition. By the time the sun sets today, you must honestly confess your true love for each other—or else the mermaid will turn into seafoam thrown from the waves, and the human will turn into dust blown on the wind, and nothing at all will be able to return you to your prior forms. Do we have a deal?”
“Yep!” said Riku.
“You mean we’d die ?!” said Iori.
“Don’t you trust in your fiancé’s feelings for you?” said the Sea Witch. “Surely you wouldn’t get engaged to be married to someone without believing in true love, right? Without believing that he loves you and would never, ever abandon you?”
Iori began to suspect that the Sea Witch might have his own issues with the concept of true love that he was bringing into this, his day job. Still, though, if he argued back too much the crab-man-thing might realize that they were here for reasons other than simple romance, so he gritted his teeth, nodded, and decided that as soon as he got back home he was getting his will in order, because this was honestly ridiculous. Before sunset today he was going to be having words with Kujo Tenn about the assholery of his father, that was for certain, and once he was dust on the wind he was going to make damn sure that no Kujo had clean sheets to sleep in ever again.
The Sea Witch produced a scroll for them to sign in their own blood; Riku did so cheerily, and Iori, after a moment, grit his teeth and did the same.
“You do realize,” he said as he stuck himself with the bone-knife and dipped the nib of the pen into the blood that welled up from the prick, “how incredibly unsanitary this is, right? If I catch some kind of bloodborne illness from this, I’m coming back and complaining.”
“Such confidence in your true love,” said the Sea Witch.
“Or maybe I’m just confident that I’ll be able to notice the blood infection before sunset,” Iori shot back, signing his name with such harsh angles that he actually punctured the parchment in a couple of places. This didn’t seem to have any impact on the deal at all, though; once his name was there in blood, he felt his body jerking, his legs fusing together; he coughed and twisted as the air suddenly seemed a hundred times drier, the room a hundred times colder, and he couldn’t even shiver, couldn’t curl into himself for warmth because there was none at all to be found in his body. He regretted severely all of the times he had given Riku flack for chasing him down for warmth in the winter—this was miserable, absolutely miserable, and Iori suddenly realized exactly why there was a Sea Witch: in order to let every single mermaid in the world have the chance to experience the wonderful sensation of being warm-blooded. Who cared about true love? Who cared about experiencing the culture of another species? The only thing that mattered in all the world was not being icy cold from the inside out, and Iori would stand by that fact until the day he died, or at least until he warmed up a little.
Then Riku shoved him into the water and suddenly the world was a kind place again.
Iori breathed in the liquid, suddenly much warmer and nicer than it ever had been before, and felt the water push out of his gills and swirl around his neck and shoulders. How strange, how new! This was a lot of fun, actually. Maybe there were some upsides to being a mermaid, after all. And he could even swim out of here without having to French Riku the entire time—
There were absolutely no upsides to being a mermaid whatsoever, and Iori regretted the deal he’d made with everything in him.
Riku joined him in the water moments later, eyes sparkling with a totally unearned glee. “Let’s head back!” he said, and Iori found that he could somehow hear and understand him perfectly fine despite the fact that they were underwater; for a moment, he considered immediately telling Riku off for his stupid, stupid, stupid and reckless, reckless, reckless plan that had earned them nothing but untimely deaths, but then he considered that the Sea Witch might also be able to hear perfectly fine underwater, so instead he swallowed his tirade and merely nodded once.
“Lead the way,” he said shortly, and Riku giggled and nodded and dove back in the direction of the cave’s exit, seemingly completely unaware that he was about to spend the last hours of his life getting lectured like never before.
Well, whatever. Let Riku enjoy the swim back to land! Unless he somehow fell in love with Iori before sunset, it would be the last swim he’d ever take.
—Except this love as the Sea Witch had defined it had to be a reciprocal thing. Why wasn’t Iori worrying about how to make himself fall in love with Riku as much as he was worried about whether or not it was possible to make Riku fall for him? He couldn’t possibly have feelings for Riku already—he had spent the majority of their acquaintanceship vehemently denying the possibility to anyone who would listen—but something seemed off despite this. Could it somehow be possible that he’d gotten his own feelings wrong all this time? And if so, when and why had he first fallen? When he bought the boat? When he learned about Riku’s past? Or had it been from their very first meeting, when Riku had accidentally beached himself while chasing a school of fish and was halfway to shriveling up and dying under the midday sun? Iori had been enchanted, then, by the fact that mermaids were real at all, but that enchantment had faded into mundanity soon after actually meeting Riku, or so he’d thought. He hadn’t noticed anything changing between them, but what if it had? What if Mitsuki and Yamato and Nagi and Sougo and Tamaki and Tsumugi had all actually been right all along? What then? Would Iori ever be able to live this down?
—Well, no, but he wouldn’t have to, thanks to their stupid horrible deal with the Sea Witch. They were supposed to fall in love and confess their feelings by tonight? Impossible! Even if Iori did actually harbor such feelings, and if he did he certainly wasn’t admitting it, not even to himself—even if he did have feelings for Riku, even if he did love him somehow, that was only half of the equation. Riku would have to love him back, and surely that was impossible. For one thing, if Riku was in love with him Iori would absolutely know it. For another—why on earth would Riku fall for Iori? The very thought alone was ridiculous. They were a mermaid and a human, two members of entirely different specieses. They couldn’t be attracted to each other. Riku was basically a fish! It would be bestiality! Probably!
You’re basically a fish now too, you know, a voice in Iori’s head that sounded suspiciously like Riku reminded him, and before he could refute this by turning back into a human and promptly drowning, it also reminded him of the dozens and dozens of folk tales about humans falling in love with mermaids, and vice versa. It clearly wasn’t impossible (except it was), it was just improbable (except Iori was a hundred times better than some lustful sailor who fell for anything with breasts and a pretty voice). (Riku had a very pretty voice.) (Iori liked Riku’s voice, quite a lot.) (Did that mean that Iori had romantic feelings for Riku at all?) (Hard to say. Not enough evidence to come to a conclusion.)
They swam to the beach where they normally met up, far from the one where the Kujos lived. It took a bit of guessing and a bit of hopeless flopping, but eventually they were both in human shape again, and Iori ran up the beach into town to get dry clothes for them both, since Riku was currently at the moment nearly entirely naked and Iori did not want to be in wet clothes for any longer than he absolutely had to. They chafed and, to make matters worse, seawater was itchy when it dried. That would be incredibly irritating to deal with on his last day alive, and so he simply was not going to be dealing with it. He did not have to, he did not want to, and so he wouldn’t.
Luckily, nobody saw Iori climb up through his bedroom window and emerge in dry clothes with another set held under his arm, and if anyone saw him running back through town to the hidden beach where Riku was waiting for him, nobody said anything. This was good. Iori was still confronting his own mortality, and if anyone, particularly Kujo Tenn, confronted him he thought that he was very likely to do something that he or they would regret.
Not that Iori would ever regret decking Kujo Tenn, but it would waste precious time. He was about to turn into dust on the wind, just as soon as the sun set! Before that happened, he would need to say his goodbyes to his family, update his will, admit how deeply he and Riku had fucked up, and reveal the identity of the Sea Witch to as many people as possible. Ideally, he would also kiss Riku again and ruin Kujo Tenn’s day, not necessarily in that order, but there was only so much time in one day, so who knew if or when he would get to that.
When he returned to the beach, Riku was still in the water. This was good; Riku was currently a completely naked human boy, and even mostly hidden under the water it was hard for Iori to look at him without blushing and feeling incredibly strange. Instead of addressing that at all, though, Iori balled up the clothing and tossed it to Riku.
“Put this on,” he ordered.
“Okay,” said Riku. “Why?”
“Because you’re naked!”
“That’s never been a problem for you before,” Riku said.
So much blood rushed to Iori’s face that he thought he might get a nosebleed. To calm himself down, he pictured all the things he didn’t like—mess, dead baby animals, thunderstorms, Kujo Tenn—and finally took a deep breath and said, “It’s a problem now. Put on the damn clothes, Nanase.”
“Okay, okay, fine,” said Riku, beginning to struggle into the clothing. “I don’t really see what you’re so upset about, though. I mean, it’s just clothes. We have bigger problems right now, I think.”
“Oh, absolutely we do,” Iori said. “Get dressed anyway.”
“I am!” said Riku. “I am. See? —Anyway,” he added, “legs are impossible to stand on, I think. And I tried turning back into a mermaid when you were gone, but I wasn’t able to do it. I think maybe we have to always be the same species and can only transform when we’re together.”
“That is hardly a problem and not worth worrying about at all, Nanase.”
“Really?” said Riku. “What problem are you worrying about, then?”
“Our deal with the Sea Witch!” Like water from a dam, the words burst out of Iori’s chest and washed around them. “Or did you think that went all fine and dandy?!”
“It went great!” said Riku. “Name one thing that went wrong with it!”
“We got no information on your missing brother and we’re dying tonight!”
“Actually, I found a record of the deal that he and Kujo made!” Riku shot back. “I wasn’t able to read it all through before Kujo showed up, but he’s definitely alive and also a human now! And who says we’re dying tonight?!”
“That was the price of the deal we made, Nanase! Or were you so distracted with proof of your brother that you paid no attention whatsoever to the thing you were signing?!”
“I paid attention!” said Riku. “All we have to do is talk about our feelings, right? That’s easy! We’re best friends and we love each other. That’s true love, that fulfills the deal. Obviously!”
“That’s not the kind of true love the Sea Witch was talking about,” Iori said. “He meant romantic, you idiot—”
“You’re the idiot, there’s a hundred million different kinds of love that aren’t romantic, I know this, I’m older than you—”
“I’m not saying other kinds of love don’t exist, I’m saying that only one kind was mentioned in the deal we signed! And besides, even if it did count every single other kind of love, it still wouldn’t matter, because the feelings need to be reciprocal, and I am romantically in love with you, Nanase, you idiot!”
Riku blinked. “What,” he said.
“What,” said Iori.
“What did you just say?”
“That you’re an idiot who doesn’t read things before he signs them.”
“Not that, the other thing!” Riku was grinning again now, and Iori wanted to throttle him. “Did you just say that you’re romantically in love with me?”
Had he just said that? Iori wasn’t sure. But he was sure that, regardless of what words had come out of his mouth, there was only one course of action available to him: deny, deny, deny.
“I did not say that, you’re making it up,” said Iori.
“Are you sure?” said Riku, still grinning. “Because I thought I heard—”
“You thought wrong, I didn’t say anything of the sort, can we please get back to the fact of our imminent deaths!”
Riku looked up at him, smiled, batted his eyelids a little. “I’m romantically in love with you, you know,” he said. “Have been for a while now. I told Mitsuki all about it. Haven’t you noticed?”
Iori’s brain went haywire. “What?!” he said. “What do you mean, you’re in— Wait, hang on a second, you told Mitsuki this? Before you told me ?!”
“Mitsuki said you were having trouble accepting your own feelings, so I should keep quiet about it until you figured things out for yourself,” Riku reported. “He also said that if you learned about any of this through him he’d have to tell you about the stuff he has going on with Yamato and the Crown Prince, and that that would freak you out so badly you might commit treason, so I should wait because of that, too. I did a good job, don’t you think?”
“No!” shouted Iori. “What do you mean, my brother has something going on with Yamato and also the Crown Prince?! Why didn’t he say anything about it to me?!”
“He said he didn’t want you to learn about friends with benefits until after you figured out romance, because that could do some real damage to your psyche,” Riku reported. “But since you’ve figured out romance now—”
“I’ll kill you, Nanase.”
“We’re in love with each other. Can’t you use my given name now?” said Riku.
“Absolutely not, I refuse,” said Iori. He grabbed the now-fully-clothed Riku and pulled him, unsteady, to his feet. “Come on, let’s go.”
“Go where?”
“I am not letting that awful Sea Witch have anything else to hold over us ever again,” he said. “So I am going to retroactively make sure we didn’t tell him any lies.”
“How?” said Riku. “I mean, we said that we were enga—”
“Exactly,” Iori said, some sort of strange mania coursing through him. “We’re getting married.”
“Really!” said Riku. “Cool! What are human wedding ceremonies like?”
“We’re about to find out,” said Iori, who didn’t really have any idea either. “Rumor has it there’s someone at the Yamamura Soba Shop who will do it for you quick, though. Let’s give it a shot before sundown hits.”
“Alright!”
Riku really was bad at walking, so Iori had to help support him all the way into town and to the soba shop. They netted a few strange looks, but didn’t seem to run into anyone they knew, so that was alright. What wasn’t alright was how long it took them to get there—Riku was really unsteady on his feet—but even as the sun touched down neither of them dissolved into dust or seafoam, so Iori figured that their conversation had been good enough, so far, and as long as they fulfilled the logical next step—marriage—everything would turn out alright. They wouldn’t die, they might start dating maybe, and they could live happily ever after, probably. And at some point in there Iori could admit that he wasn’t really a fisherman, if he found the right moment for it.
They entered the soba shop just as the last rays of sunlight were vanishing over the horizon. At this point, Riku could mostly walk on his own, though he was slow at it; this was a relief for Iori, since he wasn’t sure if they could explain Riku being bad at walking if asked directly. He sped up once inside, and approached the counter, where his friend Takanashi Tsumugi was watching him and Riku like a hawk, delight and mischief clear on her face.
“Hello, miss,” he said. “I was wondering if I could get in contact with that person who will officiate marriages on the fly?”
“Sure thing!” she said. “—Gaku! Someone from your side job is here!”
“Which one?”
“The marriage one!” She grinned and winked at Iori and Riku. “Congratulations on tying the knot, you two!” she whispered. “I knew you were secretly together. Pythagoras owes me so much money now—”
“Hang on, you were betting on us?” said Iori.
“Actually, we just got together this afternoon,” said Riku.
“What do you mean, this afternoo—”
Someone who looked like he could be a body double of the Crown Prince walked out from the back, pulling a glitzy jacket on over his apron and fixing a shiny black wig over his head.
“Hi,” he said, “I’m Elvis, don’t worry, this is all legal.”
“Sorry?” said Iori.
“Isn’t Elvis dead?” said Riku.
“I mean, yeah,” said the fake Elvis, “but look, if you feel the need to ask weird probing questions like ‘isn’t the real Elvis dead’ and ‘why not just marry us as yourself’ , you can petition the Crown for an officiant but that’s gonna take some time. I promise I have every legal power to marry you, it’s just gonna look a little weird.”
“You’re not the real Crown Prince, are you?” Iori asked, feeling somewhat hysterical.
“Not in here he isn’t,” Tsumugi told them. “But can we maybe circle back to the timeline of your relationship for a minute, please?”
“Miss Tsumugi, people who have normal relationship timelines don’t get married on the spot by Elvis,” said the fake Elvis who may or may not have been the real Crown Prince. “The important thing is this is gonna embarrass my dad at least once, twice if they need a divorce. And aren’t you on board with embarrassing my dad? I think it’s, like, a condition of employment here.”
“Well—yes—but—”
“Great, let’s go!” the fake Elvis said, swinging an arm over each of their shoulders and walking them behind the counter. “I’ve got the forms right in the back, you can file them at City Hall as soon as we’re done here. Do you promise to love and protect one another in good times and in poor, in sickness and in wealth, yadda yadda yadda?”
“Don’t you mean in sickness and in health ?” said Iori.
“Same difference,” the fake Elvis told him, kicking open the door to an office and beginning to root through the papers on the desk.
Iori sighed heavily. “I do,” he said.
“Me too!” said Riku.
“Great. Do you vow to, in the event of a messy divorce, give the king an extremely hard time about how none of this would have happened if Elvis wasn’t running around town marrying people, and how he really needs to shape up and take marriage and family and all that jazz seriously? This is a required clause, by the way.”
“What about a non-messy divorce?” said Iori.
“Make it messy.”
“…Right. Okay. I do.”
“I do also,” added Riku, “though I don’t plan for us to get divorced.”
“That’s the spirit!” said the fake Elvis, scribbling something down on a certificate, which he then passed over to the two of them. “Okay, sign here, here, and here, initial this and write down today’s date, and then file it at City Hall within the week, and congratulations, you two are legally married! What are your names, by the way?”
“Izumi Iori,” Iori said, picking up the pen and dipping it in the inkwell.
“Nanase Riku! I came here to look for my brother. And you’re Elvis, right?”
“Yeah, totally,” said the fake Elvis as they signed the document. “Best of luck with your search, and also your marriage, and also your divorce if we should be so lucky. Feel free to tell everyone about my services, too!”
“We definitely will!” Riku said happily, and Iori nodded along, scooping up their marriage certificate and carefully folding it to tuck safely away in his pocket. He offered Riku his arm, and Riku took it, and they said their goodbyes to the fake Elvis and to Tsumugi before making their way out of the restaurant and towards City Hall, husbands. The moon was big and bright and beautiful; the night air was warm and humid and smelled faintly of the sea. It was a truly lovely night, and Iori took a deep breath, gathering all his courage for his next question.
“Nanase,” he said, “would you at some point be interested in dating me for real?”
“We’re married,” said Riku.
“That’s irrelevant,” said Iori. “Would you be interested in dating me, though?”
Riku laughed. “Yes!”