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When Ajax finally makes it down to the water, Rembrandt is floating on her back with her legs crossed and her arms pillowed behind her head. This is not a pose in which it should be strictly physically possible for her to float on top of the water, but Ajax figures this is probably more magic bullshit.
Rembrandt insists that her magic bullshit does not extend as far as any sort of sympathetic control over water, but Ajax has her doubts. Case in point: she’s set herself up in the slip between docks like it’s a California king and the tide hasn’t drifted her out into the main body of the marina, where even this early in the morning people might have some follow-up questions about the girl lounging in icy water without a care in the world.
Rembrandt waits until Ajax is within plausible noticing distance before turning in the water to look up at her, which Ajax thinks is polite. She has no doubt Rembrandt has been tracking her all the way from her apartment when she woke up an hour ago.
Ajax sits heavily on the wood of the pier, which is damp and cold from the night before. She grimaces. “Can’t you ensorcell me to remember to bring a blanket next time?”
Rembrandt pulls herself up out of the water enough to cross her arms on the edge of the dock and rest her chin on them. “No,” she chirps.
“No help, that’s what you are,” Ajax complains. “I don’t know why I bother.”
As if in answer, Rembrandt blinks her enormous brown eyes and bats her impossibly long, soft lashes at Ajax.
Ajax scowls at her, but she’s already hauled herself out of bed at the ass crack of dawn to bring Rembrandt her latest snack, and she’s not walking all the way back to her apartment at least until the sun starts to warm her up.
“Fine,” she says loudly. “Here, freak. Have your freak snacks.”
Puffed lotus seeds, this time. Rembrandt is obsessed with crunchy-airy foods. Something about that texture not existing underwater.
Rembrandt pulls herself all the way up to sit on the dock and inspects the packaging when Ajax hands it over. “Mm,” she says, pointing to a spot on the label “That’s not translated correctly.”
“You can read that?” Ajax had bought it from the local South Asian grocery store, and it had one of those stick-on English labels that imported food sometimes had.
Rembrandt nods. “It’s Bangla,” she says.
“I didn’t know you’d been to Bangladesh.”
Rembrandt wrinkles her nose. “I don’t know if I have. The names keep changing.”
Ajax shouldn’t be surprised, anymore, that for all Rembrandt’s charming naivete and unworldliness she’s astonishingly well-traveled. Rembrandt doesn’t seem to find it remarkable. She’s just always piping up that she’s seen some plant or fish or something that Ajax will find out only later is only found on the other side of the world. Rembrandt struggles to recognize any of her adventures on a map - which makes sense, considering she’d been looking at it all from the water, not the land - but Ajax has yet to come up with a coastline Rembrandt definitively hasn’t been to.
Rembrandt reaches out to wipe her hand on Ajax’s jacket so she doesn’t get water in the bag, something Ajax has by now given up on complaining about. She crunches thoughtfully on a few of them before offering the bag to Ajax. They’re pretty good. Kind of like the puffed rice crackers Ajax brought her last month.
When Rembrandt is sufficiently amused by having gotten to crunch something, she lays back on the dock, kicking her feet in the water and staring up at the clouds like she was before Ajax got here.
Like most conversations Ajax has, she doesn’t really mean to start it. She’s just watching Rembrandt watch the sky and she hears herself say “So,” before she’s realized she’s intending to speak. She says the rest of the question before she can think about it, too.
“When were you thinking of leaving?”
Rembrandt turns her head to look at her, like she’d been expecting the question. “What makes you think I’m leaving?”
Ajax flushes, caught out in an assumption she hadn’t realized she’d made. “You travel so much,” she mutters. “You can’t be planning on staying here much longer.”
Rembrandt hums noncommittally. “I don’t really make plans.”
“Oh, but - come on! It’s been almost six months. You’re the one who told me you’re always wandering.” Young sirens wandered, is what Rembrandt had told her. Once they got older, they laid claim to a stretch of water and stayed there.
“You can’t really expect me to believe -” That you picked here . That you’re staying here , because of me . Ajax realizes too late that she’s having the thought, and trailing off mid sentence doesn’t do her any good against the implacable knowingness of Rembrandt’s gaze.
Rembrandt doesn’t confirm her fears or her stupid, foolish hopes. She just blinks, nonplussed. “Six months isn’t a long time,” she says instead, “I assumed I’d give it a few more years before I found somewhere new.”
Ajax frowns. She feels suddenly like she’s standing at the edge of a cliff. She’s been waiting, she realizes, for Rembrandt to disappear. A few more years . Suddenly, that feels like a lifetime. “Is that… Is that normal, for you?”
Rembrandt looks up at her, slightly confused. “We’re so far north,” she says, like that’s an answer. “Why would I leave before I’ve seen a whole year? The seasons change so much. And there’s so much I’ve already missed. I have to wait to see it a few more times so I can really get a handle on it.”
Right. The fish. Ajax can’t help laughing a little bit. Here she is, making a sweeping romantic statement about the ephemerality of time and tragic short-lived nature of siren-human relationships, but it’s really about fish. It’ll always be about fish, to Rembrandt.
Ajax lays down on the (hard, cold, uncomfortable) dock next to Rembrandt. “How the fuck have you had time to travel so much if you stay multiple years in each place?”
Rembrandt turns her head to look at Ajax, still confused. “What do you mean? What else would I spend my time on?”
“No, I just mean-” Ajax breaks off the sentence, having trouble articulating herself. If only Rembrandt could read her mind now , when they're having trouble crossing the cultural language barrier, and not only when Ajax is having embarrassing bouts of sentimentality. “Like, it must have taken such a long time. Even if you spend three years in a place, and have only been ten places, thats thirty years. And you've been to more than ten places.”
Rembrandt just blinks at her, still not understanding. “And thirty years is… a lot?”
“What- yes it's a lot!” Ajax sits up so she can more effectively glare in shock and outrage at Rembrandt. “That's longer than I’ve been alive!”
Rembrandt just stares back at her. “Ajax,” she says gently, “did you not know I was older than you?”
“Well - I don't know. Maybe by a little bit. I just thought- what you said about young sirens-”
“Ah, I see.” Rembrandt nods in understanding. “I am not a young siren.”
“But you said-”
“You asked me if all sirens travel. I said most sirens settle down.” She pauses, and something Ajax has glimpsed a few times when she mentions other sirens flits across her face. “I am not most sirens.”
“Oh. Okay.” Carefully, Ajax lies back down next to her. “Well, how old are you then?”
Rembrandt shrugs, unbothered. “I don't know.”
“How can you not know?” Ajax demands, outraged again.
“Well nobody told me I should have been counting,” Rembrandt says defensively.
“It's not counting, it's just like-” How to explain the concept of linear time to a fish. “Like, it's 2025 right now.”
Rembrandt nods like she always does when Ajax is explaining something that isn't related to fish.
“So, has anyone else ever told you what year it was?”
Rembrandt squints up into the sky, considering. “Once,” she says slowly, “I think somebody told me it was 1941.”
She keeps going, as though this is completely unremarkable information. “I don't exactly remember, though. It didn't seem that important. And besides, I'd been alive for a long time when that happened, so it's not like that's when I was born or anything.”
If Rembrandt had been human, Ajax might have generously assumed she was 21 and just very small. Accounting for magic bullshit, Ajax had been willing to believe she was maybe twice that.
1941 .
“That's-” Ajax's grasp on basic arithmetic is being interrupted by the sheer improbability of what Rembrandt is saying. “That was more than eighty years ago.”
“Yes…?” Rembrandt turns her head to look at Ajax, detecting her distress but not seeming to grasp its cause.
“It's- that's- that's an entire human lifetime!”
“Is it really?”
“Yes!”
“Oh.” Rembrandt blinks, and then looks back up at the clouds. “I thought I might go back to see her. The woman who told me it was 1941. I thought maybe that's where I would go next.”
“She's probably dead,” Ajax says, and hears as soon as she says it that it's too blunt of a thing to say.
Rembrandt doesn't seem like she noticed, too caught up in reconsideration. “Yes, I… I see that now.”
“It really didn't occur to you?” Ajax says, gentler this time, “That she might be dead?”
When she speaks, Rembrandt's voice has taken on the quality it gets sometimes when she’s talking about the past, a little bit more hollow and resonant, a little more like music and less like a human voice. “In the water, things mostly die because they get eaten. Except for whales. Whales die when they get too tired to swim, and so they drown. Humans don’t get eaten. And humans on land can’t drown.”
She trails off into silence for a second. “I’ve seen humans die. I know it can happen. I know everything dies eventually. But sirens - there are no baby sirens. We just are . And nobody’s ever seen a dead siren. We can’t drown. Nothing can eat us. We can’t starve. So - I don’t know. Maybe I thought humans were more like that. I’ve never been around one long enough to find out.”
“Eighty years really isn’t that long,” Rembrandt says, voice small.
Ajax shrugs. “It’s not long enough to see every kind of fish,” she agrees, “But it’s long enough to do plenty of other stuff.”
Rembrandt frowns at the idea of doing anything with her life other than trying to see every kind of fish.
“But you won’t have that problem,” Ajax says softly, wonderingly. “You’re just going to live forever?”
Rembrandt scrunches her face up in discomfort. “I don’t know. There are things underwater, things that don’t ever die. But they’re not alive like we are. So I think death has to come for us eventually. I think… I think we live as long as we need to.”
Just when it seems like she’s not going to continue, Rembrandt opens her mouth again. “I got tired once. A long time ago. Before 1941. I went up to the Arctic, under the ice. Where it’s always dark. I just laid down on the bottom and watched everything happen around me. Everything moves so slowly there. It’s so cold.
“I kept waiting to starve. To get so hungry I’d have to get up. But I didn’t. I just lay there. I thought maybe that was how sirens die - we just lay down on the sea floor and eventually it swallows us up.”
“But it didn’t.”
Rembrandt turns her head in Ajax’s direction, but her eyes are glassy and far away. “It might have. But it’s so cold there, and there’s so much pressure. Sometimes it makes these spikes of ice that come down from the roof. Someone explained it to me once. I think I laid there for years, but the ice moves so fast when it wants to. When the ice came down, I got out of the way. I didn’t want to die.”
“And then?”
Rembrandt blinks, and the spell is broken. “And then it was over. I went back out from under the ice. That was it.”
Ajax lays there for a moment next to her, under the cloud cover like the ice of long ago, and listens to her breathing. Thinks about the lack of heat radiating off her body, and the way her heart would still go thump thump thump if ajax put her head on her chest.
“For what it’s worth,” she says after a while. “I’m glad you moved.”
“Oh, hm.” Rembrandt, in so many ways, is unburdened by sentiment. Ajax envies that in her; the natural ability to let go, to walk forward in life without dragging everything she touches along with her.
Despite this, her eyes soften, her mouth pulls up at the corners. “Yes. I am, too.”