Work Text:
A fur coat. There's a fur coat on the beach.
(Foreshadowing, Alex thinks later - foreshadowing. No one takes a fur coat to the beach. No one leaves a fur coat on the beach.)
Alex picks it up because the birds will hurt themselves on it, because it'll wash into the sea and the turtles will hurt themselves on it, because it might be faux fur and oil based and cause a small catastrophe - Alex knows oil in the water, he knows it, he knows the oil coated swans and their dying offspring, knows the stories of flocks of birds drowning, their wings made too heavy, their feathers clinging together -
Alex knows oil. Alex knows birds. Alex picks up the coat and keeps walking.
Then -
There's a hand, a blue-white one, a gold-freckled one, a fawnlike gentle hand with twig wrists and long fingers, and then there's an arm and then there's a pile of seaweed over a body.
“Okay,” says Alex, “okay, shitshitshitshit-” and drops to his knees. He's not a doctor but he knows stuff, Aaron is pre-med, he's taught him stuff and he watches crime shows, okay, checks his breathing, checks his pulse, both there, and then he says “hey,” and the body makes a pained noise.
“I’m going to pick you up, is that okay?” he asks and the body, the boy says “mm” and he gets his arms under his knees and his armpits and he gets him up.
(A hit or miss, lifting up people whose injuries you don't know. Alex thinks about this later, and he thinks about it constantly.)
He's light, skin and bones, the coat weighs more than he does. Short. Skinny. He opens his eyes and they're blue. Blue like rye flowers; blue like forget me nots; blue like -
“My -” he starts, and Alex goes “your coat? I found it. I got it,” and the boy goes limp and Alex clutches onto him a little bit tighter.
(Blue like his lips, or his fingertips, or his eyelids. Alex isn't sure how he was going to end the sentence anymore.)
He falls onto Alex’s couch from his arms like he’s made of seawater. He doesn’t want to take his bed; he says “no, no, please I can sleep on the couch, I’ll sleep on the floor, please don’t give me your bed,” and Alex gets him a blanket and a pillow and brings him water and sandwiches.
(He doesn’t eat them, just stares at his hands and watches the tendons move as he plays with them; traces a finger along the bones of his wrist like he can’t quite believe they’re there.)
He isn’t as blue anymore and Alex lets himself be talked out of calling an ambulance. Maybe he just had to get into the warmth of a house. Maybe he’s okay.
Alex hangs the coat up in the bathroom, brushes the fur until it’s free of sand and grime. He touches the softness of it and wonders what it’s made of.
Alex crashes into his bed. He draws the covers all the way over his head and dreams of nothing.
---
The next morning the boy is gone.
Alex walks over to the couch and touches the cream cushions with the palms of his hands as if to make sure he’s not just hiding beneath them. He’s not.
Alex considers the way the light pierces the windows and touches his fingers and worries a little. He touches his fingertips to his lips, one at a time, careful. Where did he go? He didn’t look like he could have made it home in that state. Maybe he felt better after a good night's sleep.
Alex goes to shower. He feels like he’s covered in sand and salt, suddenly.
The coat is still where he left it the night before, the hanger hanging off the half-closed bathroom door. Alex looks at it while he washes his hair and wonders. It’s still there. Why is it still there?
---
The boy comes back a week later. He’s soaked, curls sticking to his forehead, and there’s a look in his dark blue eyes that Alex thinks might be resignation.
“My coat,” he says and Alex goes to get it wordlessly. He’d been waiting for this.
He looks better. He isn’t blue anymore, isn’t pale - he’s put on a little weight and he looks healthier, his freckles don’t stand out as sharply anymore. He looks like he came straight from the ocean. His shirt looks like it’s glued to his body. Alex can see his ribcage through it.
“Here,” mumbles Alex and hands him the coat. The boy reaches out.
Their hands touch.
Alex flinches back a little, barely noticeable, and hopes that the boy doesn’t realize. The boy smiles at him weakly, and then he extends his hand out properly, says “I’m sorry. I never introduced myself.”
Alex takes the hand. It’s cold, a little slimy in the way that skin tends to get when you touch seaweed for a long time.
“Alex,” says Alex.
“John,” says the boy, “John Laurens.”
“Hamilton,” adds Alex as an afterthought. John’s eyes are blue again, or still, and he smirks with his sharp teeth exposed.
“I figured,” says John, and his voice is like bells when he’s amused. He points at Alex’s door. It says Hamilton. Alex smiles weakly. John is still holding his hand in one of his.
---
So John returns another week later still smelling of seawater and feeling like the sharp rocks in the water just off the coast and he comes in with a bottle of wine and Alex kisses him and John lets himself be kissed and John touches him carefully and Alex kisses his neck and his fingers and feels almost overcome with reverence at the baby blue of John’s eyes and the pink tint of the tip of his nose and his wrists, rubbed raw and tender under Alex’s thumbs when he smooths over the skin there and John trembles under him, dark curls like the tendrils of something dark and long-limbed around his head on the pillow.
---
John starts appearing outside of his house -
on the rocks facing the sun, on his porch, on the yard.
He’s sunbathing, he explains to Alex.
“Why on my yard,” asks Alex, bemused, and John just shrugs. Cracks a smile. Alex doesn’t know if this is what he considers to be flirting but it’s kind of working.
“Well,” he says when John just keeps smiling wordlessly, “you’re welcome to come in when you’re done.” He goes back in.
The sun sets. John knocks on the door. Alex lets him in.
---
“Go into the city with me,” says Alex one day.
John shakes his head and swims deeper into the water. Alex stays still, lets the waves hit his chest, his shoulders. “I don’t go into the city,” John calls out to him from his new spot in the water, a few dozen feet from Alex, “not really my thing.”
Alex considers this. He flops onto his back and closes his eyes. The sun is a little gentler than usual today. The water takes him closer to John and when he’s close enough John grabs him by the shoulders to keep him from floating away. Alex doesn’t open his eyes and John doesn’t say anything. He splashes a little with his legs and then he keeps splashing a little. Absent. Gentle.
“I know what you are, you know,” says Alex after a few moments have passed. John doesn’t stop splashing. Alex opens his eyes. John’s looking down at him. His eyes are red-rimmed with salt water and dark, not a pure blue anymore, mud mixed in now. Alex thinks he can see yellow.
“Yeah?” asks John. He looks a little dangerous in this light. A little predatory.
“Yeah,” says Alex, and closes his eyes.
---
“Did you know,” says John at the breakfast table, fingers around his glass of orange juice, “that I’m only allowed to spend seven weeks with a human at a time.”
Alex freezes. The oil in the pan makes a crackling sound.
“Seven weeks?”
John nods mutely.
“How long has it been?”
“Five,” says John, mechanical, “On a technicality. But still. I have to return to the sea soon.”
“Oh,” says Alex. He’s a little dizzy. “A technicality?”
John looks at the wall. John looks at the tablecloth. John looks at the wall again.
“I watched you. I wanted to reach out to you a lot sooner. But I wanted to keep you a little longer. You weren’t supposed to find me.”
Alex clenches his eyes shut. Alex clenches his hands into fists.
---
John brings him his coat.
Just the coat - he himself doesn’t appear at his door. Just the coat. It’s gross again - covered in sand and algae and dripping wet, like a dead weight that Alex carries into the house. He imagines John bundled up inside of the coat, curled into a ball, and clutches the coat against his chest protectively.
Alex isn’t sure what John wants him to do with it so he just dusts it off methodically and hangs it up. It’s still wet and the wet sand in it won’t come off, and Alex knows it’ll take a few days for the coat to dry enough for him to clean it properly. It’ll dry gross, but then again, he doesn’t think John cares that much about what it looks like.
John doesn’t come back for a bit. He knows John can’t go back into the ocean without the coat but he doesn’t know why he gave it to Alex. He doesn’t know why John himself didn’t come back.
---
On the fifth day of the sixth week Alex finally understands that John is giving him a choice.
Alex sits down on the bathroom floor and clutches at the fur and has -
he has no idea what he’s going to do.
---
.
John comes back, with no explanations like usual.
He bites Alex’s neck and jaw and whispers into his ear and into his skin and he begs, and Alex doesn’t know what he’s begging for but he kisses him, lets himself be kissed anyway, and John feels solid as usual beneath him, and he doesn’t want to let him go afterwards but John says he has to go.
Alex watches from the window of the dark kitchen as he slips into the night. On the porch he suddenly stops, and his body goes rigid, his spine straight, faces the ocean like he’s listening. Alex watches John’s body face the sea in the lamp light and understands for the first time that he isn’t human.
He whistles into the wind. Alex watches as he pauses. Waits. Alex doesn’t know what for, and then there’s another whistle, this one coming from the sea, breaking the chatter of the seagulls.
John’s face breaks into a sad smile and Alex breaks into tears.
---
The next day he takes his supplies out to the stones behind his house right where the grass turns into sand. He puts down the wood and the the gas canisters and just looks for a moment. Looks at the browning grass and the slick, gray stones. He thinks about the smell of gasoline and firewood when the match touches them, when it all catches on fire.
John appears almost out of nowhere, still out of breath from swimming. Alex doesn’t look at him. John comes to stand next to him, quiet. He seems oddly vulnerable. Alex looks at the angle of his jaw, the slope of his nose, and his hands itch.
And he knows.
Alex takes the coat and he pours the gasoline on it and he takes out the matches.
“No,” says John, weakly, “no.”
“I’m not going to let you go,” says Alex. John watches him, his green-brown eyes wet. Like shallow water. Like waves over brown rocks.
Alex looks into his eyes and knows that John has already made his decision as well.
“It’s been so long,” says John, and it's a moan, it's a mourning thing, it’s canines bared, not human, and Alex strikes the match, half expects John to lunge at him, but he doesn't. The match catches fire, and then he's lowering the flame to the logs and the skin and then it's on fire. It's done.
Through the smoke and the gasoline fumes John’s eyes look wet and tired, red-rimmed and resigned. There's a brief moment where Alex wonders if he's made a terrible mistake, but then John makes a low noise in his throat and drops onto his knees on the sand.
“Alex,” he says, and then he starts crying.
---
The harbor lights are bright up close. John’s hair is salt-slimy and his hands are cold. Alex kisses the back of his neck and John shivers. He still feels like how sharp rocks feel under Alex’s feet.
“We should go back,” whispers Alex, “it’s getting cold.”
John glances back at him. He’s shoulder deep in the water like Alex but unlike Alex he isn’t shivering. Alex wraps his arms around John’s chest a little tighter. John looks back out towards the ocean.
“Yeah,” says John. He makes a low whistling sound at the back of his throat.
The harbor lights flicker.
John closes his eyes and whistles once more.
“Yeah,” he says, “let’s go.”
Somewhere in the distance a higher whistle responds.