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No one visits the lake anymore. It's dangerous, that much is known and real. A girl nearly drowned just two years ago, and would have died if Caecus weren't there.
The second reason no one visits is because Caecus is there. It's not like he claimed Erie or anything, this is just one of the other, little lakes. One he can have. He'd assumed this would be fine, who cares if he also visits a lake mostly populated by local teens. Even though he stayed out of the way and to himself, even though he did what he thought he was supposed to and fetched that drowning kid back to shore, he still got yelled at. Look who had to get saved by frogboy. Gross, he touched you, was it sticky.
Whatever. It's his lake now, Caecus supposes. The kids from school stopped showing up. He walks the periphery, prodding the toe of his shoe into the mud and water-plants. It's for the best that no one else comes here. They're annoying and stupid. He's not even a frog. Frogs don't have scales, stupid.
Caecus crouches down. His reflection stares back at him. Wide eyes that don't blink much, cloudy as if he's got cataracts but his vision is just fine. Fine, maybe he's a little froggy. Lightly greyish skin doesn't help, but he doesn't look that different from everyone else. His uncle and mother look the same, and they're fine. Caecus pokes the reflection in his cheek, breaking himself up into ripples.
His skin isn't clammy, either. That much. Scales grow in tiny dots over his cheekbones like faintly iridescent freckles. Caecus has always liked them and his mother back when she liked him said they were cute, that they would grow in more and show his heritage that he's a strong kid.
They never did, really. Just over his shoulders and spine, but nowhere else. Maybe that's why she stopped worrying about what he was up to. Whatever. It's not his fault if he's a late bloomer, like Uncle Orne says. Another bonus of no-one being here is that Caecus can tug his shirt off, leave his clothes safely hidden and wade into the water in just swim shorts without feeling the need to cover as much of himself as humanly possible.
The water is cold against his skin. It's gentle in a way that very little else in the world is. Caecus likes to believe it's sentient in its own way and at least it likes him. The water envelops his body regardless of what he looks like and holds gently around him. There must be some kind of god in there, one he can pray to and have something happen.
Orne was supposed to have the books that would say so. He'll come back with the texts that would tell Caecus how to properly disappear somewhere he belongs.
Caecus sits in the lake, legs drawn up to his chest. His nose has to poke just out of the water. It annoys him, this proof of weakness that keeps him from being able to submerge and disappear forever. The closest thing he has to gills are divots on his neck and chest, closed seams that refuse to open no matter how long he holds himself underwater.
He was supposed to be able to breathe there. Little minnows get used to his presence quickly and dart around him, their glittering silver bodies subject to his envy.
It's not that he hates them, or really even the other schoolkids that exist on the opposite end of the spectrum. It would just be easier if…
Caecus takes a deep breath and submerges himself. His eyes don't hurt when he opens them underwater to watch the little fish. Unlike everyone else he can see just fine here (he's better. He can see because he's special, better than them, they're jealous). Minnows are coated in the scales that just barely adorn his jutting and ill-fitted bones.
Caecus watches them until his lungs burn with a reminder that he's too weakly human for this. One day, though. One day when Uncle Orne comes back with the main family's secret books and can remake both of them into a body that fits.
At the bottom of Lake Erie, a scouting party finds the remains of a skeleton lashed to a sunken ship, flesh long picked clean. Beneath it, another corpse still with the remains of a past local school uniform and the silver that called the discoverers there glowing between its ribs.
Even with a knife and ritual pleading, Caecus's gills never grew in. When he wakes next, though, with a body of flesh and light surrounding him he believes for a beautiful instant that it did. He is back, he crouches on an altar of perfectly smooth stone, and a long finned tail curls behind him.
By all accounts, the ritual his uncle brought back worked. But as Caecus looks around the wrongness starts showing. A woman stands impassive before him, one who lacks all physical marks of seafarers but who bleeds a power into the air around her that makes Caecus's throat freeze in instinctive fear. Orne isn't here. There are seafarers, yes, but they also all congregate on land and have bodies that do not match his. They look at him impassively. Gills on Caecus's neck do not inhale for him.
There is no homecoming. One of the seafarers turns and mutters something to the fellow next to it in a way Caecus has seen hundreds of times before. The complaint of someone who has looked upon him and found him wanting. Scales on his shoulders, now grown in heavy and sharp, bristle reflexively as if he's some kind of cat rather than a sleek fish who belongs here.
“Did it….” He doesn't know where the rest of his sentence is going to go. Did it work, did it fail, is he ‘home’, did he become finally someone acceptable?
The woman in front of him looks impassive. “The Awakening succeeded. Your ritual, I can only assume that being what led you to drown, lacked faith.” Faith and words proper are all one needs, and the words have been kept by the Orne family since Miryam started her alliance. “Come.”
She doesn't wait for a response from Caecus. She turns and leaves. The seafarers clear a path around her. Caecus follows. Wary looks are thrown his way from the congregated people. He looks more like them now, less human, but still– still it's a familiar and human distaste reflected in them.
Caecus's arms protectively clutch around his body. Fins grow from his forearms in a way he would later find beautiful, when he can stop and look at the gauzy organs. Now, though, it's just a bewildering sign that this, too, wasn't enough. Somehow still, he's changed, he's changed, and every change was wrong and irreversible. He was supposed to become one of the sea people and be welcomed. Humanity was beneath him. Humanity was a stage below in the evolutionary table that fears that which is different and stronger, while the fishfolk would know their own and welcome Caecus.
None save the witch speak to him. Something must have been wrong. Something, again, must have changed him badly. Stuck forever in the halfway. Maybe she's right and the lack of faith is to be blamed. (A part of Caecus screams in the back of his mind: how is he supposed to have perfect faith when this is his life, how could a god expect him to be firm and doubtless when no god could ever even deign to form him properly one way or the other? How dare they say his faith is wanting when he has only ever been called insufficient with no way to change? Where then is the earning of faith? But this too must be shoved down and ignored. This, too, the desire for salvation that he doesn't have to claw his way to– that is only another thing that will be found wanting.)