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Shiori and Miko don’t look at each other for years, when it’s done.
— This is how it happens: Shiori fulfills a contract.
She towers over Hinako: scaled, too-large, inhuman. Branching coral growing from her eyesocket (Hinako says once, her fingers delicate on the growth, face close enough to Shiori that she can feel her breath on the scales of her face, You know, it makes sense like this. Something with so much life from you. and then offers something delicately bashful about aquatic ecosystems as explanation when Shiori doesn’t know what to answer); the pale, massive length of her tail curled up over rocks on the seafront. A single long claw pressing into the tender stretch of Hinako’s throat.
Hinako’s face is resolute. Mouth curved faintly up at the edges. Scared; Shiori can hear her heartbeat run and run.
Shiori tells her, her voice the alien, incomprehensible intonation that belongs her mermaid form, attempting the levity she always does for Hinako, “You can’t exactly take back your promise now. We did swear an oath, no?”
It’s an offer: try to. Please. I’ll find a way. There’s no longer the scent of the decaying sea attached to Hinako that signifies the wish for death; she smells like mermaid blood and happiness. It makes Shiori’s stomach turn.
“I know, Shiori-san,” gently. “It’s okay.”
Then, she takes a step back from Shiori’s claw and turns away to sit on a nearby rock next to her tail, careful with the folds of her skirt and as if she doesn’t notice the look on Shiori’s face. Frowning down at the way the fabric underneath her gets damp with the remnants of seawater.
Shiori looks at her. Remembers the child trying to nurse a monster back to health with small hands and brightly kind eyes. Smells her in front of her. “You don’t want to die anymore.” You don’t want me to eat you.
Hinako looks as if she wants to reach out to Shiori for a moment, like she’s not sure if she’s allowed to anymore, a hand barely stretching out before it drops back to her skirt. “If it had to be anyone, I’m glad it’s Shiori-san,” with her head tilted to the side, considering. She’d cried for hours when she’d first realized she was happy, the flutters of something waking up inside her, light welling up inside her in floods after the years of shadows at the bottom of the seafloor. Locked herself up in her house; Shiori outside her door and listening to the sound from through the wood. “I’m scared, but I— I had fun, these last few years. I don’t think I would’ve, if I couldn’t trust in the ending that was coming. I’m sorry. I know it was cruel to make you promise. I know know it was selfish, that you and Miko-chan will be upset for a long time afterwards.” Shiori is silent, and Hinako says again, her voice soft, putting on a brave face: “But it’ll be okay, for me.”
A beat. The waves lap at the shore.
Hinako asks, “Can I ask one last thing from you, Shiori-san?”
“Haven’t you asked enough?” Shiori asks, dry and toneless, which means: yes.
“It swallowed me up, when my family died,” she says. “I know it’ll be hard. Please don’t let it swallow up you and Miko-chan, when I’m gone.”
THEN:
When Hinako is gone and the taste of cannibalism lingers sour in Shiori’s mouth, she leaves the town. Enters Hinako’s home once to collect possessions, and then drops herself back of out of humanity and into the sea. She sees Miko on the streets before she goes; not with blame in her eyes, but not without it. Trying to slot back into their typical bantering routine, petty annoyance with concern slid underneath it—almost trying to help, still, like she can’t help it—but dissolving into something else: her face wet and crumpling.
Shiori wants to wipe the wetness away from her face. Shiori wants to cry with her: something inside her torn and bleeding, Hinako’s body in her stomach.
She goes wordlessly.
Shiori tries her best.
She spends weeks at sea, drifting, isolated and aching, trying to keep the taste of Hinako to herself and hating the way it stays tucked underneath her tongue, the way she can still feel her fangs rending flesh with tenderness, and then: she tries her best to live.
They’d both been changed by each other— Hinako had been a hand reaching out from the other side, so human it hurt, simple kindnesses and connection. Shiori can’t live in the distance she’d spent years almost-content in, even with the wound of Hinako’s death raw and open; as though she’s outgrown a skin, trying to place herself back into a suit of shed scales and finding it ill-fitting. The sound of the hollow, loveless ocean slides over her skin, wrong.
She avoids Miko’s town.
There are too many memories there: Hinako in each setting, coaxed into smiling, in tears, looking at Shiori.
Shiori goes to new seaside towns and cities instead, restless traveler playing human, picking up novelties and kindnesses. Watches the years pass. Learns to build rather than simply survive. Spends years and years learning, setting roots down and playing harmless, adapting new ways to live with her claws still sharp and hunger still stabbing at her gut. Doesn’t allow the blank space of where Hinako had been eat her up in turn— even when the grief reaches at her and even when she thinks of sinking into it, selfish in return, wanting the comforting numbness of saltwater and purposeless drifting.
“You understand now, right?” Miko asks.
It’s an anniversary: they stand on the bridge Shiori had reunited with Hinako on, thinking, what happened? Thinking: this child wants to die. It could be more awkward than it, but there’s something more settled underneath Shiori’s skin this time, years after the last time she’d seen Miko. Their faces are dry.
Shiori looks down at the dark of the ocean, and then at Miko: ageless kitsune, her scent mingled with the scent of this town, domesticated. The odd responsibility Miko has always taken upon herself, directed at Shiori once again. It’s a type of greeting when Miko continues, “You smell almost human.”
Shiori tilts her head and asks, slipping into a familiar habit of shameless obliviousnessness: “Like a nice snack? Miko-chan is so kind.”
“Ugh,” Miko says, and bats at her shoulder, disgruntled. Familiar back. “Actually, you haven’t changed at all. Nevermind, I’m leaving.” Nothing to keep her there this time, but she stays where she is despite the empty threat, standing at the ledge of the bridge.
Shiori smiles. “I see you haven’t, either.”
Hinako had said once, I’m glad you two will have each other to keep each other company, when I’m gone, and Shiori had stared at her lack of comprehension. Thought: you really don’t see, do you? The ghost lingers between them as if another of the lost souls thrashing in the water below them, but Hinako is gone. If anything is left behind, it's sitting in every corner of Shiori’s body; dead by her own promise. Miko looks at Shiori without resentment this time. Still this town’s local deity, powerless except in her own right as a kitsune, trying to save everyone she can. Still as if she’s taken in Shiori as one of her own.
Miko fidgets with a sleeve, looks like she wants to say something.
Shiori cuts through it, effortless. Thinks of summer, thinks of Hinako, thinks of wanting and changing without meaning to. The concept of sides of the world; their trip to the zoo, Miko warm-blooded and looking at humans as if something to love. She does understand now, and she says instead of that, thinking of carrying ice-cream back to Hinako’s house time and time again, “I was craving the taste of something sweet I couldn’t find in the sea.” Sadly, put-upon, “Humans don’t actually taste like ice-cream. Is that truck we used to go to still open?”
A thread of looseness curls into Miko’s posture and she says, “Not at this hour, half-fish woman. And if you try to eat my humans I’ll eat you instead, and I don’t want to have to pick out your bones from my teeth.” It’s playful. A pause: “There’s somewhere else, though.”
Their bodies are close together, when they go. Human guises side-by-side.